Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dog walker who lives and works in Contoocook.

Two or three times a year it falls to me to hang a big art show, 100 pieces or more, at one of the cultural institutions with which I am affiliated. Over the years, I must have hung three or four dozen art shows, and it’s one of my very favorite things to do.

The first time I was faced with a large number of pictures to hang in a coherent show, I was pretty intimidated. But the show went up just fine. The next few times I had a big show to hang, I was still a bit intimidated. Would the next show turn out as well as the last one?

After five or six shows, it dawned on me that I didn’t really have anything to worry about. If good artwork comes in the door (and it always does), a good show will go up on the walls. Enough artists have told me that they like my hanging to make me think I’m pretty good at it, and more than a few people have told me that I have enough of a hanging style that they can recognize my work. Moreover, when I am given artwork to hang and a space to fill, I am usually able to sort things out surprisingly quickly.

Once I realized that I have a knack for hanging art, I started thinking of that knack, only half-jokingly, as my superpower.

My first introduction to superpowers came from a girl with whom my daughter played basketball years ago. She was a year older than my daughter, and they played together on three or four different teams. My daughter’s teammate was by no means a star, but she worked hard and had a great attitude. She was the kind of kid any coach would want to have on their team.

She also had an uncanny ability to materialize on the court, out of nowhere, at the perfect time and in the perfect position, to catch a pass or grab a rebound that she always put in for a two-pointer. The first time I saw her do that, I was impressed. But then she did it again. And again. Once I recognized the pattern, I realized that this player’s ability to appear, like magic, under the basket, was her superpower.

And my superpower is hanging art shows. There’s so much that’s so wild about my having and discovering this superpower. First of all, if you had ever seen anything I ever produced in art classes when I was in school, it would have been fair for you to have concluded that I couldn’t even spell the word “art,” much less have any affinity for anything artistic. On the other hand, however, Nancy Jo and I did begin to collect art when I was in my mid-thirties, and I developed a bit of an eye; I knew what I liked, and I could explain why.

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Here’s the other wild thing about my superpower. It was lurking around inside me for forty years before it emerged. If not for a string of fortuitous circumstances, it might never have emerged at all.

But it did come out, and today, some of my happiest days of the year are the days when I get to hang an art show. I walk into a room with bare walls and a big stack of pictures, confident that in a couple of hours, there will be an interesting art show on those walls. Part of my confidence comes from knowing that with good artwork to hang, a dozen different equally excellent shows are possible. I just have to find one of them.

I have a few rules and principles I use when putting a show together, but much of what I do is at a level below consciousness. I just walk around and let pictures speak to me, and to one another. I suspect that that mixture of conscious and unconscious effort is how my daughter’s basketball teammate operated on the court. Some of what she did was the result of good coaching and hours of practice while the rest of it just happened, for reasons that she probably could not even explain.

Now here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure that everyone has a superpower or two. And I know from personal experience that exercising a superpower (work that lies between doing something consciously and just letting it flow ) is truly exhilarating. I also know that superpowers can emerge from the most obscure nooks and crannies of our inner selves.

Since you just never know when a superpower might emerge, it would seem that the best way to discover a superpower is to try new things and explore new experiences whenever possible. Put yourself in a position to let something unexpected happen. You might find that you have a hidden superpower just waiting to show itself to you.