The other day, some friends introduced me to their newborn baby. The experience opened my eyes anew to the wonder of human growth and potential. Our futures are not set in stone.

A newborn baby certainly has encoded characteristics such as the physical aspects of race. The child’s genetics and prenatal experiences will influence personality and health. Nationality, family and birth order are already determined.

To a newborn baby, however, none of these characteristics has any meaning. Physical characteristics such as gender and eye color have no context in which to operate. Social connections and position do not yet exist to someone who cannot yet recognize a face. There is no wealth, no power and only the barest, early traces of personality in a newborn. Everything else is still raw, unshaped potential.

As we grow from infancy to adult, it is the interaction of genetics and circumstances that determines how our human potential develops. These interactions are all shaped and governed by people. At first, our families are the ones who influence and provide meaning to our lives. They provide for or fail to provide for our needs. They teach us what it means to be human, they distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and they provide us with a foundation on how to interact with other people. Over time, the family’s role in shaping us fades more into the background as the rest of society takes an increasing role. Teachers, religious institutions, the media and peers all contend with parents for influence in shaping our lives, until we ourselves as adolescents emerge as individuals and begin truly to make decisions for ourselves. It is this capacity to make one’s own decisions on values and behavior that separates adults from children, and it is how we make those decisions that reveals our character.

What we tend to forget, however, is that we are always still that newborn baby, consisting of nothing but potential. Yes, we have characteristics because of our pasts and our DNA, but those only have meaning if we give it to them. We always have the option to be reborn – to set aside the teachings and determinations provided by parents and culture, and to find new ways to interpret the circumstances of our lives. We do not have to be who others say we are; as adults, we have the power to make our own decisions. We do not have to follow the paths provided to us; we can go in new directions and can establish new paths for others to follow.

In more pragmatic terms, as adults, we have the power to look at the institutions and attitudes in our lives, and to either accept them, reject them, change them or replace them. In fact, if we live in a free and open society, we have the responsibility to examine these systems and to adjust them as necessary. As adults, we decide the values we hold, and we choose how to express those values in our businesses, our government, our religious practices and our arts. We do not have to mimic what we have inherited from our parents; we have the ability and power to build new ways of living that are more true to our chosen values. We are adults. We make our own decisions. We are born with endless potential, and that potential is still here. We can become whomever we want to be.