Aging Capriciously

What is the one thing that we all want in life but that we can’t buy or pay for?  We can live a life without it but we will end up feeling like we only lived a shell of a life.  We can chase all over the world for it but we will sometimes end up finding it in our back yard.  We can live a life with security and comfort and never find it.  We can settle for the mundane but we will regret that we did not have the courage to grab it when it was in our reach.  Sean John says “Life without passion is unforgiveable.”  You can buy his cologne for fifty dollars an ounce but it will not give you passion.  Most of us will never have passion in our lives.  We might think a one night stand or our favorite team winning the Super Bowl or taking a trip to some exotic land is passion but deep down inside of us we know that these activities are only surrogates for passion.

“The saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there’s nothing to make it last.” ― Nicholas Sparks

You can climb Mount Everest.  You can dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.  You can get a Ph.D. degree but you can never get passion simply by accomplishing things.  Passion is not a fad or a commodity.  You can’t buy it in Walmart or find it on top of the Empire State building.  Most of us do not grow up with a desire for passion.  We do not even know that it is missing in our lives.  Passion gets smothered in us when we are very young.  It is extinguished before it can be ignited.  Passion scares people.  Authorities and parents both fear passion.  The passionate person is a juvenile delinquent.  Early on, parents, teachers and others wage a campaign to destroy the roots of passion in children.

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love” ― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Someplace deep inside all of us, the embers of passion still burn.  We go through life thinking that there must be more to it then what we are experiencing.  We look for God.  We look for Ghosts.  We look for love.  We look for things but still they do not bring us the passion that we crave.  Some spark must be ignited in us to rekindle our passion.  When they speak of quality, they say that you will know it when you see it.  However, you can’t see passion.  You have to feel passion.   We know it exists because from time to time, we can get a glimpse of it in others.  The passion that we sometimes see in others thrills us to the bone and leaves a certain degree of incredulity in its wake.  We know we are missing something that seems unfathomable to us.  Greatness and passion seem to comingle.  Does greatness produce passion or does passion produce greatness?

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”  ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Hollywood is perhaps the most frequent purveyor of passion.  We get our impressions of passion from our Hollywood idols and movie stars.  Passion is pervasive in Hollywood.  From superheroes saving the world to unrequited love romances to tales of great daring, we glimpse a world where passion is the norm.  A world where passion is as common as grass.

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” — Nelson Mandela

Looking at passion from a theoretical perspective, (something rarely done) we can see that there are three areas in which we can inspire passion.   These conform to our three life components.  We can be passionate about ideas or thinking.  We can be passionate about doing or activities and we can be passionate about feelings.  What about things you may be asking?  I will argue that we cannot really be passionate about things.  Hard core motorcycle riders usually care more about riding their bikes than they do looking at them.  Trophies, money and even fame are ephemeral and rarely suffice to infuse passion in anyone’s life.

“Maybe the bike is more dangerous, but the passion for the car for me is second to the bike.”  — Valentino Rossi

People who are passionate about ideas are intriguing.  We find that they have a love for the mind and all things cerebral.  We may not understand their theories and concepts, but we are fascinated by the premises and hypotheses that they can spin out.  History has shown that a key element of progress lies in the intellect that a civilization can bring to its culture.  The Jews, the Greeks and the Chinese each stand out in our minds with their history of great thinkers from Abraham and Maimonides to Socrates and Plato to Confucius and Lao Tzu.  These cultures had a deep respect for the ideas and philosophies of its great thinkers.

Some of us are passionate about books, education, museums, history, biographies, TED talks, documentaries and other intellectual activities.  We would rather read a good book then go to the Eiffel Tower or the beach.  Our ideal life is of the mind and not of the body.  We no sooner finish one book then we are off to another.  Our dream of heaven is one vast library with no late charges.

“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”  — Steve Jobs

Some people are passionate about their activities.  Great explorers like Marco Polo, James Cook and Zheng He lived for the adventure and excitement of finding new places and new civilizations.  For such adventurers the risk was hardly a consideration given their dreams and desires for discovery.  One cannot imagine anyone undertaking the hazards and deprivations that met these men without a true love for action and doing.  People like this cannot be content in an arm chair reading a good book or sitting in front of a fire place with a family watching TV.

Some of us are passionate about our work or our sports.  We love what we do so much that we would pay our employers to let us do the work that they are paying us to do.  This is what passion means.  To love something so much that you would pay someone to let you do it.  We live for the activity whether work, traveling, sports or a hobby.  Our dream of heaven is an activity that allows us to become intimately involved with the act of creation or the challenge of overcoming some obstacle or the chance to exceed some goal.

“If you don’t love what you do, you won’t do it with much conviction or passion.”  — Mia Hamm

Our final passion involves the realm of feelings.  We usually think of passion as connected to sex.  We have watched the all night love affair of two Hollywood stars as they undress and ravage each other in a fit of what one might call sexual frenzy.  We marvel at their physical dexterity.  Two bodies engaged in positions that would challenge the authors of the Kama Sutra or even tax a painters abilities to portray.  And to think, that after they are done, they start over again until the sun begins to dawn on another day.

“When I touched her body,
I believed she was God.
In the curves of her form
I found the birth of Man,
the creation of the world,
and the origin of all life.”
― Roman Payne

But sex is only a small part of what emotional passion can be.  Passion can involve feelings of all sorts.  People who are deeply passionate about their emotions feel things that the rest of us do not.  They feel the joy and pain and sorrows of other human beings.  They experience the highs and lows of existence.  They live a roller coaster of feelings that range from happiness to sadness.  They do not let the pain of empathy discourage them from identifying with the feelings around them.  Perhaps the greatest fear that people of feelings have is the fear of apathy or indifference.  People who are passionate about their feelings live for harmony and rapport with others.

People who live a life of passionate feelings dream of a heaven that will be populated by all the people that they have known in their lives.  They want to see all their old friends, relatives and loved ones.  They dream of making amends for the wrongs that they have done to some and sharing their love and compassionate hearts with all others for infinity.

Time for Questions:

What are you passionate about?  Do you have enough passion in your life?  How could you have more passion? What would happen if you tried to live a more passionate existence?

Life is just beginning.

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”  — Maya Angelou