Cultivating Relational Potential: 5 Actualising Potential: The Ethics of Becoming

To cultivate potential is one thing; to act within it without closing it is another. Every act actualises — it selects, differentiates, brings one relational configuration into being at the expense of countless others. The challenge is not to avoid this, but to do so in a way that sustains the field from which novelty arises. Ethics, in this light, is not a code of right action but a sensitivity to the conditions of becoming — a discipline of non-finalisation.

Action, conventionally conceived, aims for closure: decisions, deliverables, completed forms. But when viewed relationally, each act becomes a gesture within an ongoing ecology of transformation. The question shifts from “what should I do?” to “what does this act make possible — or impossible — next?” Ethics thus becomes a matter of rhythm and resonance, not rule: how to move in ways that continue the unfolding rather than interrupt it.

Actualising potential requires an awareness of scale. What may appear as completion at one level can be an opening at another. A poem ends so that its meanings can begin to circulate; a theory concludes so that new inquiries can be posed. The ethic lies in the orientation — acting toward continuity, toward the renewal of generativity rather than its foreclosure.

This ethics asks for humility before the unfinished. To act without domination is to act provisionally, to leave seams visible, to build structures that can be unbuilt. In this sense, becoming is both the process and the responsibility: we are not observers of transformation but participants in its patterning. Every construal, every utterance, every alignment contributes to the evolving topology of what the world can become.

To actualise potential ethically, then, is to hold the field open even as we move within it — to act as if possibility itself were the primary stakeholder. It is a commitment to continuity over completion, to unfolding over outcome. Through such acts, the cultivation of relational potential becomes more than a stance: it becomes a way of inhabiting becoming itself.