Let’s talk about passion. It’s a driving theme of nomadness, of learning, of life in general – it’s the crystallization of dreams, the lust for evolution, the antithesis of comfort.
Without passion, life is spent waiting… waiting… waiting for someone else to make it all seem worthwhile.
With it, growth is a way of life and you are in control.
Passion is not an intellectual notion, nor a psychological abstraction. It often appears for a while in association with sex, but that’s not what it’s all about either. Passion is raw and all-consuming, and can’t be replaced with religion, New Age interpretations of experience, academic compartmentalizations of the universe, pleasure seeking, or a romp up the career ladder. It’s intense, almost violent; it renders everything else in life unimportant while driving you on a quest of personally epic proportion.
Something like that is not to be taken lightly, especially if you once felt it but now sense it slipping away.
The problem is that our cultures, in different ways, discourage passion – although not overtly, of course. We’re politely encouraged to excel, to invent, to make something of ourselves. But the people who actually do so have had to struggle past the boundaries of a society that offers up numbing entertainment, reduces education to the level of homogenization, discourages personal risk in its corporate world, applauds conformity, treats the exceptional as aberrations, and rewards the successful with that spectacularly sanitized mediocrity known cynically as suburban bliss.
There’s an abrupt boundary between the haves and the have nots, as far as passion is concerned. You can’t just dabble in passion – it’s all or nothing. Suddenly finding it makes you resent Christians for appropriating that otherwise useful term “born again”; losing it makes you feel dead.
No, there’s no such thing as a passion dilettante. Your life is either driven by a grand, magnificent, all-encompassing design… or it isn’t.
What is possible, unfortunately, is to live passionately for a few years then suffer through the agonizing process of watching it slip away – without even knowing whether it’s recoverable. It must be a bit like Parkinson’s Disease… the mind goes, but slowly enough that you witness your own dissolution and understand perfectly well what it means.
I am discovering, however, that passion can be viewed as a tidal, and thus cyclic, phenomenon. It has been in my life, certainly, with every ebb a slow tragedy and every flow an exuberant celebration of new growth. I recoil from stasis with the fire of a new project… then burn out and fall back into stasis. The question is: how can one short-circuit this process and keep passion alive? Could we survive nonstop passion, day in and day out? Is endless passion even possible? If we see it slipping, can we snatch it back?
One way, I think, is with landmarks. For me, it’s a strange mix of favorite road music, an amusing juxtaposition of nomadic system design concepts, fantasies of magical encounters Out There, and a few freeze-frame images of intense romance or adventure etched like lightning flashes on my brain.
Another way to hang on to it is by spending time with passionate people – other mad, driven souls who brave the chortlings of the complacent, celebrate risk, and fear not the specter of bankruptcy. It’s powerfully reinforcing stuff, and when you forget your own passion, a spark from someone else’s can reignite the blaze.
Yet another way is through obsessive learning: peeking under rocks, exploring different cultures, chasing seductive unknowns, and emerging into the sunlight from the mine of your own specialties to exchange information with those in other mines (a process better known as consulting). Learning is a delicious addiction, even though schools usually present it as a method of working for approval rather than daring to reveal the terrible secret that education is actually a magnificent form of play. Satisfying your curiosity at every opportunity is a good way to keep your passion alive.
Remember why you are. Life is only once, and slips by so smoothly that you can get away with coasting through a whole career and still look pretty good. Think about what you really want. Grasp it with unshakable passion and focused desire. Everything else is secondary.
