Find your passion.
Everywhere you turn, it seems someone tells you to find your passion. They say, “You can’t be creative until you find your passion.”
Look on a milk carton for missing passion; put up signs around the neighborhood: “Missing passion;” file a report in the post office— “passion wanted: dead or alive.” Passion has fled the scene of the crime.
Even the FBI can’t find your passion.
The problem with finding your passion is “what the hell is it anyway?” What are we all looking for?
We think of passion as an all-consuming fire and fury—like the cover of a romance novel—a splurge of shameless excitement burning in your heart while your clothes are shredded by the pulsating blood in your veins. We think of passion as the romance of people who are painted on book covers because they are too beautiful to be photographed.
Is that passion worth finding? Sure. But no one can feel like that every day—or even wants to. Think of the wardrobe replacement costs.
Passion entered the English language in the 12th century from the Latin word for suffering, such as the Passion of Christ. It didn’t begin to carry sexual overtones until the late 16th century.19 What does it say about our culture that our word for intense romance derives from a word for suffering?
Today, we say forget suffering, passion leads to fulfillment, even to ecstasy. Based on etymology, your passion is something you are willing to suffer for. However, no one expects you to endure waterboarding for your right to macramé. But there is insight here.
Finding your passion means asking: what are you willing to take pains to accomplish? What are you willing to do over and over again to satisfy your expectations? Where are you willing to invest time and sweat? What do you do that may even lead you into a state of ecstasy?
Ecstasy derives from ancient Greek—ekstasis—meaning “out of place,” and, by implication, “in a trance,” “out of mind,” and even “out of body.” By the late 16th and early 17th century, ecstasy became mystical: “a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things.”
Now, consider ecstasy as a trance, a time when you are lifted out of your ordinary mind, your daily concerns. You become indifferent to time, focused completely, in a state that Mihály Csikszentmihályi (Csikszentmihályi is pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high.”) dubbed “flow.” You find yourself lost in your work. Now, maybe you and your passion both seem to be lost. But, in fact, you are reunited. Your search is over.
This is ecstasy worth searching for—complete absorption in your task, oblivious to passing time. For example, teaching a class with such focus that the classroom feels like the whole world in one moment. Janis Joplin described performing as the intensity of the moment when nothing else existed but the music. Ecstasy—the feeling of stepping out of time.
This is not the moment of “eureka.” It is not the grand slam home run or the cry of “Aha!” These are simply pleasurable, sometimes intense, sometimes difficult, moments of work and thought that can occur every day. But they don’t occur every day.
So, ask yourself, do you enjoy the work of your domain at its simplest level? If you want to play the piano, does the simple act of running your fingers through a scale give you a modicum of pleasure? Do you get a little charge of anticipation out of arriving at your office, classroom, studio, or lab? And do you occasionally find yourself lost in your work, striving to get it right, oblivious to time—absorbed in flow, in ecstasy?
Finding your passion is not a set of breast-heaving thrills, but rather a simple sensation that you are doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right place.
***
Folk wisdom says, “find your passion.” But we are not single cell animals. We develop multiple passions throughout life. Even the most single-minded, focused creators maintain multiple passions.
Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, were driven by an intense desire to understand radium, even while they were being physically consumed by radium. They did not openly discuss the danger of radium poisoning, even though Pierre’s fingers became so deformed he could not button his own shirt.
Curie called her work a “consecration.” She wrote of her father-in-law that his ultimate wish had been to “consecrate his life to scientific work.” During their courtship, Pierre asked her often to share in “his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research.”
Curie’s consecration seems deeply religious, a revival of passion as suffering. Few of us today want to live a consecrated life—a life of devoted fury to the exclusion of all else. Curie was diligent in her scientific work. But she had more than one passion in her life—her daughters. In 1904, she wrote:
Don’t you find it delicious to have a little tiny being to love? As for me, I adore little babies, but that doesn’t prevent me from also loving my big seven-year-old daughter.
During World War I, she converted a truck into a mobile X-ray lab to diagnose wounded French soldiers. She personally conducted the X-rays driving as close to the battlefields as possible. Her devotion to her adopted country, France, rivaled the Polish patriotism of her childhood.
For Curie, science was a consecration. She was said to run her laboratory like a convent. But she was a woman of multiple passions, as we all are. It is a rare person who can say “I have found my passion.” So, instead of imagining one true passion, consider anything and everything that engages you, everything that you are curious about.
Your curiosities and passions shape how you choose to see the world. The more you choose to see and explore the world, the stronger your imagination will be.
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