‘Ripe Potential’ Gets a Holiday

The other night my friends John and Suzanne (this deeply committed and wonderful English-teaching couple on sabbatical from Deerfield Academy) came into my apartment to discuss some boy’s-dorm-behavioral issues, and they looked at the empty walls of my apartment, and said, “You know John, this is your home now. There is such potential here to make it nice.” I agreed. I sighed—the only really homey thing about my apartment is the dozens of refrigerator magnets I had lugged the thousands of miles from the United States. Don’t get me wrong—I love these magnets—my eclectic 3-D scrapbook of the last 12 years of my life with photo-magnets of Emma and Jack, play casts, souvenirs from jet-setting friends, and examples of my treasured friend Anne’s penchant for buying a magnet from every gift shoppe we encounter on our travels. John and Suzanne’s apartment, maybe 200 yards from mine, looks like a potential-photo shoot for “Middle East At Home Digest” (I don’t believe such a periodical exists actually) with their rich rugs and handsome chairs and commanding chests and Bedouin knick-knacks adorning their generic-disguised dorm apartment. They have obviously taken delight and care in outfitting their apartment with the most sumptuous accessories of our region. “We need to take you to see our friend Mr. Ziad and start you buying some carpets,” suggested Suzanne.

But life here, of course, is not all adventure travels and shopping sprees. Perhaps as in any workplace, the road to work is studded with disappointments. In schools, the disappointments tend to revolve around the investments you make in a young person and their inability, or recalcitrance to make what we deem a good return on that investment of hope and energy.

One of the ground rules I laid down for myself when I started the blog last July was that I didn’t intend for this to be a forum in which I would just vent all my frustrations. As Judy Enszer, the doyenne of Frisco, Texas society, said to me, this blog should be about impressions, and trying to get down feelings and perceptions as they happen. I never want to write unflattering things about colleagues or experiences here in this oh-so-public forum, but there is certainly cause to discuss the ups and downs of teaching.

There is a student here who has frustrated adults since the week of orientation in August. Her first comment to me was, “By the way, I know how to get alcohol in Aqaba [a seaside resort on the Red Sea].” On most every day, her rudeness is galling, her irresponsibility stunning, but all fall faculty and administrators kept hoping that she would make that proverbial turn around. If she did, wouldn’t we just feel so validated and wonderful! Well, here it is February, and those hopes are fading. On a recent day, as my class intensely analyzed Crusader-era documents from Muslims about Christians, and Christians about Muslims, this young scholar blurted out, “Hey, Mr. John—do you like pink?” That was a mild distraction compared to others.

In fact in this last week I sat at lunch with colleagues, and one young teacher sat there so defeated by this child’s cunning ability to hi-jack a class right from under her. Another teacher, a veteran of truly inspiring magnitude, fumed all through lunch at the incessant rudeness of this child. I walked the younger teacher outside into the winter sun, and she started to cry. Never let us forget the power these children have over our lives—they can move us to tears of joy, as when Hamzah or Thaer succeed against the odds, or when Farah or Maya show us kindness, or others move us to tears of frustration, or humiliation or rage.

The following morning, as I walked to breakfast, this same young student came up the steps at the same time. She saw the water on the pavement, and asked, “Is this water from the watering of the grass they do? That makes me so mad! I can’t think of a bigger waste than watering this dead grass. It’s the biggest waste,” she fumed. As if a writer from heaven sent me the line, I retorted, “what about the waste of potential???!” She shot me a look. I think she got the point.

So here we are on Valentine’s Day. I feel some compulsion to write something about Valentine’s Day—oh, this morning at the school morning meeting, this Kurdish student stood up and wished everyone a “Happy Commercialized Love Day.” You can imagine his personality, probably, based on that public announcement. While I enjoy some of the day as a chance to send cards to people whose love has most touched me, I certainly feel rather ill-equipped as an unmarried seldom-dater to extol the virtues of this Hallmark-soaked day. I remember once asking my father who his role-models had been for long-term marriage, and long-term love. He remarked that he didn’t actually know many long-term love matches, most of the decades-long marriages he had seen seemed more like survivor matches.

So what do we do about Valentine’s Day—what kind of holiday is it? Of course it is about love—but how do ever pierce what the emotion contains? I looked back at the loves I have most enjoyed, both personal and professional. I looked at my parent’s courtship and marriage (I don’t think the courtship ever really ended if you knew them at all) and realized that it comes down to the concept of potential—that possibility of a long-term commitment, a realization of becoming something. I know, I know—hard to get more abstract than that, huh? Let me work on a couple ideas I have about this.

By the way, in the last few weeks I have discovered the joy of dictionary.com, as a fun place to see what lexicographers say about words. I looked up the words for “potential,” and then “ripe.” Here is a portion of what they provided me with:

po·ten·tial
1.
possible, as opposed to actual: the potential uses of nuclear energy.

2.
capable of being or becoming: a potential danger to safety.

3.
Grammar. expressing possibility: the potential subjunctive in Latin; the potential use of can in I can go.

4.
Archaic. potent1.

5.
possibility; potentiality: an investment that has little growth potential.

6.
a latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed.

7.
Grammar.
a.
a potential aspect, mood, construction, case, etc.

b.
a form in the potential.

8.
Electricity. electric potential

9.
Mathematics, Physics. a type of function from which the intensity of a field may be derived, usually by differentiation.

10.
someone or something that is considered a worthwhile possibility: The list of job applications has been narrowed to half a dozen potentials.
po·ten·tial
1. Capable of being but not yet in existence; latent: a potential problem.
2. Having possibility, capability, or power.
3. Grammar Of, relating to, or being a verbal construction with auxiliaries such as may or can; for example, it may snow.
1. The inherent ability or capacity for growth, development, or coming into being.
2. Something possessing the capacity for growth or development.
3. Grammar A potential verb form.
4. Physics The work required to move a unit of positive charge, a magnetic pole, or an amount of mass from a reference point to a designated point in a static electric, magnetic, or gravitational field; potential energy.

ripe
1.
having arrived at such a stage of growth or development as to be ready for reaping, gathering, eating, or use, as grain or fruit; completely matured.

2.
resembling such fruit, as in ruddiness and fullness: ripe, red lips.

3.
advanced to the point of being in the best condition for use, as cheese or beer.

4.
fully grown or developed, as animals when ready to be killed and used for food.

5.
arrived at the highest or a high point of development or excellence; mature.

6.
of mature judgment or knowledge: ripe scholars; a ripe mind.

7.
characterized by full development of body or mind: of ripe years.

8.
(of time) advanced: a ripe old age.

9.
(of ideas, plans, etc.) ready for action, execution, etc.

10.
(of people) fully prepared or ready to do or undergo something: He was ripe for a change in jobs.

11.
fully or sufficiently advanced; ready enough; auspicious: The time is ripe for a new foreign policy

These have some interesting possibilities for better understanding Valentine’s Day…

It looks like a tangent, but…

As I have surveyed world history texts this last year, it is interesting to note how editors sum up (or other verbs might be, reduce or dumb down) what Christianity is about, and what is at the heart of Christian behavior. Since Christianity has permeated my life since birth, it is always intriguing to see how they bring it all together in a scant few pages of prose. In these books, they seek to sum up the ideologies explored throughout world history in under 800 pages. That is a tall order. So they need to be clever as to how they sum up complicated ideas. In many of the books I have perused, the message of Christianity comes down to the stirring call as found in what has been called, the Sermon on the Mount, in the book of Matthew.

As what looks like another tangent, Martin Luther King, Jr. owes much of his reputation to that biblical Sermon on the Mount. On November 17, 1957, in Montgomery, Alabama’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King concluded his sermon with this: “So this morning as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and all over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you.’ I would rather die than hate you.’”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all, radical thing a human being can say. What a Valentine’s Day message! And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all, radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” What a call for love. What an audacious proposal. In this age of seemingly mutually assured destruction, there is indeed ripe potential for reconciliation here, and in my new home in the Middle East, watching my students enjoy a Valentine’s Day Square Dance, it makes a lot of sense.

Dictionary.com provides one with about 30 languages versions of “potential”—quite a lovely thought that so many societies harbor such hopes for possibilities. Here is the Arabic for this powerful word: مُمْكِن، مُحْتَمَل، كامِن

Go ahead—seize the day. Make a holiday of something ripe.