Do You Own Your Own Potential?

Maybe I shouldn’t swear as much as I do. But if you’ve ever stepped on an acorn while barefoot, a few colorful curse words makes for a logical form of self-expression.

Fall in New England is a magical metaphorical time. It’s a season of letting go, of change, and of preparation. For me it’s also a time of reflection and contemplation as we head into the silence of the coming winter. Regardless of the season, I still need to eat, and as I made my way to my grill I was reminded just how painful stepping on an acorn while barefoot actually is.

As the oaks begin shedding their leaves they also drop their acorns, and with the oak tree’s close proximity to my house the back deck is constantly littered with their presence. Acorns are an oak tree’s way of perpetuating their species. While the ones on my deck will never take root, other acorns the tree has dropped may find the proper nurturing environment to turn an acorn into an oak tree. A fascinating process of Nature ensuring it’s own survival.

Acorns are little packets of potential. The seeds of what they were created to become reside inside each of them. But no matter the potential residing within them, their growth and full expression require cultivation in an environment conducive to growth and full expression. They’ll never become anything just resting on the patio.

Us humans are quite similar to acorns, aren’t we? We, too, are all little packets of potential with the seeds of what we were created to become resting within each of us. We, too, will require a nurturing environment conducive to supporting our own growth and full expression.

Unlike acorns whose growth is contingent primarily upon external conditions, the most important condition for our growth is internal. We get to create our own inner environment which will be conducive to our own fullest expression, of turning the potential of what we were created to become into who we actually become.

Mindset is the environment, and it’s an environment we control. We get to decide how nurturing of an environment we are willing to create for ourselves.

Sometimes the Universe finds unconventional ways to get my attention.

Stepping on acorns is quite painful.

Not growing into all we were created to become carries its own level of pain, a pain which will linger substantially longer.

Photo by kike vega on Unsplash