Sport scientists in-becoming: from fulfilling one’s potential to finding our way along

It is common to encourage people to envision life as a process of fulfilling their potential. But what exactly does this mean? Traditionally, this question has been addressed by way of ‘complementarity’; dividing the human into biological and cultural components. Fulfilment is placed on the side of the cultural; an acquisition of encoded secondary information transmitted from predecessors that represents what it means ‘to know’. Potential has been defined from the biological, as a suite of innate capacities localised to the mind and body, passed on through a mechanism of genetic inheritance. Founded upon a metaphor of inter-generational transmission, this perspective leads to a conceptualisation of life as a progressive closure, ‘filling up’ the biologically innate with the culturally acquired. However, despite its prominence, this static view leads to a troubling question: with one’s potential fulfilled, where is one to go next? In this theoretical commentary, we offer an alternate, dynamical account of potential and fulfilment by leaning on Ingold’s notion of wayfaring. From this perspective, life is not a process of being ‘filled up’ with secondary information, but of responsively ‘opening up’; corresponding with varied experiences cast forward by others, as they to ours, situated within a continually unfolding field of relations. Ontologically, this view is of ‘us’, not as beings, but becomings, finding our way along generative paths inhabited alongside others. Knowledge is not transmitted inter-generationally, but is grown by primarily experiencing the coming-into-being of things we enter into correspondence with. Initiated through a prologue, these ideas are exemplified in sharing our storied journey as sport scientists in-becoming, following not objects of convention, but corresponding with things of curiosity.