You don’t get to pick your passions. Your passions pick you. Much as we might prefer to be passionate about one thing or another (what’s cool and would set me apart? what could make me a million dollars?), our passions tend to emerge unbidden. And if we can turn our enthusiasm on and off? Then it’s not really a passion.
In college, I used to love sitting around the dining hall and hearing what folks were thinking about, just because their passions were so diverse. Solar car racing. Ultramarathon running. 1920’s fashion. Speaking Chinese (that was me).
A colleague told me once that she could sense a passion by the way someone’s eyes light up when they talk about a particular subject.
Art, so often, is about passion. Passion that we didn’t really get to choose.
I know a young art student whose passion drives him to do interesting, unpredictable things. He had an idea of something he wanted to make out of clay. So, having never taken a ceramics class, he figured out how to make what he was inspired to create: a giant octopus. It’s a magnificent octopus. But if he had told someone in advance that he was spending all that time for an octopus? Would someone tell him he should work on something “more productive?”
If we could each harness just a little of that authentic energy, we could make magic happen. But only when we do it for our passion. Better that we each do something to make our passion speak, than that we try to force something else because it’s what we should do. (And no, I don’t mean quit your day job to be a traveling bard! Our lives have room for responsibilities and passions and lots of things in between.)
If we all supported our passions and threw ourselves into the joy of that, wouldn’t whatever we created be amazing?
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