If you stray into an airport bookshop you will find a display of books for businessmen whose blurbs would, if subject to a critical boiling, reduce to the words “harnessing your untapped potential”. That concept strikes a nerve in each of us. Which of us does not feel that if we had more time and space and money we could achieve so much more than we have to date? There’s that book we meant to write; the journey went meant to make. Our true selves are ground down and stultified by circumstance. We are “cabin’d, cribbed, confined”.
I had dinner with a friend: S. S fell in love in his last year at high school. He did so with the abstract intensity that only someone who went to a boys’ school could. His girlfriend was a screen upon which he projected a great romantic longing. He went off to one university to study History. She went to another to study Italian. Shortly into his second term he paid her a visit. Things were not as they had been. She seemed cold and distant and there was the problematic presence of a tall and charming American undergraduate in her room to be accounted for. After some discussion she revealed that she was very happy with her new man and that S himself was now history.
He returned to his own university and set about brooding. His studies suffered. He then came up with a plan. He would switch universities and win her back. So he began his second year at a somewhat less prestigious institution that his former girlfriend attended. As plans go this was an utter stinker. The first and most obvious difficulty with it was that as she was studying Italian she was spending her second year abroad. So as he arrived she left. He brooded some more. Eventually he knuckled down and got himself a 2:1. That is a very respectable degree result. Firsts (the only higher grade) are deliberately only rarely awarded.
After a while he took to brooding about his result. If only he hadn’t been such a fool. If he had concentrated on his study he might well have got himself a first and gone on to teach. He had untapped potential begging to be harnessed. He went instead to work in publishing and by dint of scraping and saving (and never buying a round – just kidding S), he put together a fighting fund that would support him through a course of post-graduate study. He took years to find the perfect course and when he was happy that he had the right course at the right university with the enough money to support him he quit his job and devoted himself to his studies. The more he worked on it the more he loved his academic area. He shunned society simply because his studies fulfilled him in a way beer and crisps could not compete with. Then, at the end, he got another second class honours.
That was sobering for all of us. What if that unwritten novel is a piece of garbage waiting to be dropped? What if that untaken journey ends up as 6 months in hospital with malaria and ameobic dysentery? What if, scarily, a belief in a real but frustrated talent is of greater value than a genuine shot at demonstrating our mediocrity?
I really believe that education is about the process as well as the result – S may have got a second class degree but he studied what he wanted in the way that he wanted to do and his studies fulfilled him – disappointing to not get the result he had hoped for but surely he got a great deal out if it? And it’s the same for the great novel, journey, whatever – the process is what it is about. At least that’s what I try and remind myself.
I agree. I did an Open University course a couple of years ago and loved it. It is surprising how many of my contemporaries are now complaining though that they do not feel tha they have “achieved” what they had hoped to. I suppose next will come pony tails and a sports car as the mid-life crisis tightens its grip.