Striving

My Facebook access is officially blocked, all  of the modes I was using to get around the blockage have been cut off. While it's not really all that big of a deal, I've been able to realize how much time I misuse on FB, nevertheless it's a nice way to promote my page here. 

I've been co-planning for a series of five day summer camps, meeting with the various government ministries, visiting schools, interviewing new trainers, catching up with the current trainers and continuing to navigate a one room office work environment. Cubicles all of a sudden don't look so bad!

I was reviewing some readings from UMT and came across this Carl Rogers quote:

“The actualizing tendency can of course be thwarted or warped, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the organism.  I remember that in my boyhood the potato bin in which we stored our winter supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small basement window.  The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout — pale white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring.  But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow two or three feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window.  They were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing.  They would never become a plant, never mature, never fulfill their real potentiality.  But under the most adverse circumstances they were striving to become.  Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish.  In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped . . . I often think of those potato sprouts.  So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, and scarcely human.  Yet the directional tendency in them is to be trusted.  The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving; in the only ways they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming.  To us the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life's desperate attempt to become itself.  It is this potent constructive tendency which is an underlying basis of the person-centered approach.”  Rogers, Carl. The Foundations of a Person-Centered Approach. La Jolla, California: Centre for Studies of the Person, 1979; pgs. 2-3.

We're striving to become something a little more and hopefully, unlike the potato sprouts, we will become closer to our full potential.