Maybe I should have stayed in bed.
At least then I could have avoided another day rattling around the notion of passion with only this thought or that coming to mind and providing no clear direction.
Ouch. Sort of sounds like my life for a couple of decades.
Gave up the only dream I had of becoming a doctor late in high school, and the rest is history.
No passion to speak of and certainly no obvious direction to head.
Welcome to Lost Life 101.
The upside of wandering I suppose, is being afforded a lot of time to wonder about passion – and the lack thereof.
One must have a passion after all, right?
Do what you love and never work a day in your life.
How come everyone else had a passion except me?
I didn’t want to live a life of drudgery.
Everything nebulous inside nagged and screamed there was something more important for me to do.
My passion must be somewhere!
If I searched long enough surely I would find my one magical passion and life would be set.
But what if I got it wrong? What if I found a passion I wasn’t totally passionate about? Wasn’t willing to die for?
Then what? More wasted time no further ahead?
A case of Perfect Passion Paralysis was setting in.
Passion is supposed to be big, larger than life, and propelling as much as fulfilling.
My recollections of those heightened rushes of energy didn’t feel like passion at all. Bull-in-a-china-shop, dog-with-a-bone, and cattle-prod are more accurate descriptions.
They also felt closer to fleeting than sustaining.
If a life of passion meant living from one peak of frustration to the next, I wasn’t sure humdrum looked so bad after all.
About the time I’d almost given up I started to see woven threads in between. I became the observer of myself being a moth to flame.
I didn’t need passion to have a purpose full life.
Life was coming through softly right in front of me.
Passion is a powerful force, a sister to Lust having Love as their parent if there was such a family.
An energetic high is the result of both, similar to the body’s adrenalin rush.
The heightened awareness is invigorating and enthralling, which only serves to exaggerate the presence of lack.
But only when we interpret the absence as a loss or emptiness.
Just as lust gives way into a deepening of Love not accessible otherwise, so too does passion give way to a deepening of and opening to our true selves.
As long as we’re looking for that high we miss out on the greater possibilities waiting to come through.
Many passions are before us as the many expressions of who we really are. We are by no means limited to simply one.
I now see passion as a signal to look deeper for what else lays underneath ready to come forward.
And won’t fret so much when life appears mundane.
Living Bliss is a jump-in-with-both-feet look at where Life bumps into the everyday – whether at work, play or times in between. Bliss knows no separation in the end. From a deeper dive into the ordinary pops forward the extraordinary life we search for – and has been there waiting for us to be.
Not quite a crazy cat lady – yet? – Lorraine’s insatiable curiosity of life leads her to explore, question and push beyond the box. A self-professed “left-brained creative big picture idea” type, she has an intuitive knack for seeing possibility everywhere and in everyone, and is a moth-to-flame for being part of turning possibility into reality. More of Lorraine’s musings can be found on her blog.