Using the random word generator (here) today I was presented with ‘Untapped’. I really hate the obvious, as it is too easy and usually wrong, so I immediately pushed away the word ‘potential’ as it popped into my mind.

What else could be tapped and so remain, potentially, untapped?

Well, you tap a tree for its syrup and you tap a barrel for its ale, but after that it became a lot more difficult to find things to tap.

Hmmmmm, maybe potential is the way to go after all.

Everything with energy has potential. Hurricanes bring down homes if their potential is tapped, international politics has the potential to start wars, Twitter fuels have the potential to lose people their jobs…maybe tapping potential isn’t such a good idea after all.

But people use energy too (even when sitting on their backsides, tapping at a screen) and people are WAY more complicated than hurricanes and Twitter.

We have the potential to loudly and violently destroy lives, including our own, but we can also save them, quietly and unassumingly. If we set aside our fears of failure, our upbringings and conditioning, if we decide that trying is better than not, then we can change things.

Sometimes it takes a while.

Because tapping untapped potential doesn’t have to be a great foamy gush as if explosive gas bubbles await, it can be a slow drip of changes in perspective, moving glacially away from what was harming us.

The first step in tapping potential ISN’T realising that it exists, I don’t think that idea sinks in until some of it has come out. The first step is realising that you WANT to do it.

Unless the idea of maple flavoured beer turns your stomach, in which case step away from the keg and put down the hammer.