Finding Your Passion

Many times, over the years I have heard people say, "Follow your passion and you will never work a day in your life." On the surface, it is an intriguing idea: to never work a day in your life. Of course, it doesn't mean that you will not be slugging it out somewhere in the world. It simply means that the "slugging" process will feel differently than simply going to a job because you get paid.

That is the way most of us would probably interpret the saying. It's not rocket science, BUT how do you get a handle on the concept of passion. It is not just something that is fun to do; although some amount of pleasure/satisfaction often accompanies passion-driven activities. So, how do you know when you have found your passion? What does that actually feel like? It is the "feel like" part that I believe is so often under-examined in people's writing about passion.

The latin root for "passion" is suffering. On the surface that doesn't seem like something we would love to do for the rest of our lives. In fact, for many people, suffering is exactly what they do... every day in their jobs. Jobs that they must be paid to perform, or they wouldn't do them. Jobs they look forward to being away from on holidays, vacations, and sick time. They count down the years, months, days, hours, and minutes until they are able to retire. They share sayings like "Another day, another dollar," "That's not my job," "Did you hear what they want us to do now!?" "The day I win the lottery, is the day I say adios to this place!"

I, however, am talking about the suffering we love to experience. It is a special feeling. Passion has its origin in Latin meaning “suffering, submission.”  It seems a stretch to connect suffering with something we would pursue with our whole hearts and minds. But think about the moments you are holding your child or loved one. There is no amount of holding, hugging, touching, or kissing that satisfies that feeling of wanting to incorporate them into you. We say things like, "I could just hug you to death!" That is essentially the way I view passion: the intense and insatiable desire to become one with someone or something (like painting or saving the whales). The inability to accomplish the complete, or sufficient, melding with the person, object, or activity creates a longing for what you cannot seem to have. That longing is the suffering I associate with passion.

Now that you have a feeling anchor for the concept of passion, you can explore the opportunities to find that in your work. You can examine the things that draw that feeling from you. If, for example, you are a guitar player/songwriter and you have a new song in progress. Passion is the feeling you experience when you cannot wait to get back to work on it. The essence of the song, the feeling it evokes from you, the meaning it has for you, and more, all create that desire to pull the song into you. Once it's complete, you look forward to beginning again.

Every occupation, from being an accountant to a musician, has the capacity to stimulate a person's passion. From an outsider's perspective, many people cannot understand how someone could be passionate about being an accountant while others cannot fathom why someone is drawn to perform music. But the great thing is that we don't need to understand it. We only need to find ours.