17062013
Recently I have been thinking about
passion. I have been accepted to university to study a subject I am
not passionate about in the same way I have been passionate about
other things so far, and this lack of “fire in my soul” makes me
question the whole concept of motivation and what has been driving me
forward so far.
In the past few years as I have been
mainly working and having arts as a hobby, trying to get into art
schools but never succeeding. I have met a lot of people in my
working environments that have either told me or shown me they have a
passion for nothing, and many of them have told me (with a tone I
have interpreted to be sadness, bitterness and/or powerlessness) that
I am lucky to be passionate about something. I have usually been
unable to reply to such words, because all I have seen are people who
are unwilling to find their passion. Recently I have come to realize
that these people alone cannot be blamed for their lack of motivation
for anything but survival and escapism, because the society itself
determinedly passivates people from the moment of birth onwards and
offers no assistance to overcome this.
Yet I have to question the whole
concept of passion. When I am doing something that I have “a
passion” for, I usually work with intense focus, I learn fast and I
forget all else – I exist for that moment of action, whatever it
may be, and I forget to eat, drink, rest – and I usually do not
even have a need for any of this. I have experienced this with
drawing, painting, making music, dance, stagework with other people,
contact improvisation (including sex), baking, hiking, walking
around, reading, studying, exploring my surroundings, having a
conversation – a lot of things. I could basically have a passion
for anything, even breathing, or eating, or drinking. I mean, if I
can have a passion for moving my body aimlessly simply because I
enjoy the movement, why not for anything at all?
So maybe “passion” is something to
be found when you're at the core of an action, when you have a
“reason” for it – which is to live, to realize your existence
in this moment, in this reality. When I apply this to my motivation
to study, I can see that I study because I realize my possibilities
in this web of relationships we call “society” or “the world”
or “the system”. I enjoy studying things that I see to have
relevance. I enjoy applying the information that I absorb. I do not
know how I will apply the information I am going to absorb in the
future as my studies progress, because how I will apply it is
dependent on what the information is – lol – so I cannot plan it,
I'm going to have to create my future as I go. And that's alright.
So, yeah. In studying I am living
according to my passion for learning, and I have some idea of how to
specify my studies based on the fields that interest me. But this
pathway didn't offer itself to me. I had to dig it up and choose it
among a mass of options, all appearing just as uncertain to me.
Somehow I think that the people who lack passion for things believe
that this magical feeling of knowing what to do and why will just be
gifted “from the above”, like enlightenment of some sorts. But
this is not the case. If you have never seen a book, how would you
know that you have a passion for reading? If you have never sat on a
bike, how would you know you have a passion for riding a bike? How
would you ever figure any of this out if you didn't explore the
world, everything that there is in it, given that you have the
opportunity for it?
As a child grows it integrates fast
into whatever the world is shown to be, and if not given the mental
tools to question this, if what one has experienced during one's
childhood and adolescence is not fulfilling one might end up
believing that the world is unfulfilling – when in fact it is one's
experience of one's life so far that is unfulfilling and not the
world itself. So people get stuck with the environments they have
been born and raised in, with the activities they are familiar with,
because they have not been taught to seek passion, to work for it. I
was lucky enough to be gifted with a lot of opportunities to explore
different activities as a child, and for this I am grateful to my
family – but a lot of things I have discovered on my own as an
adult, simply by grasping a point of slight interest and expanding on
it through independent exploration. And these points of interest have
grown into passion the more and more I have learned about them and
invested myself into them.
So what I'm saying is that the belief
that one ought to have a passionate feeling about something in order
to act at all is a fallacy. If I'd keep on expecting a “holy
spirit” to take over and direct me for myself, I would get nowhere,
I would be standing still and waiting around for the rest of my life.
Passion is not a heavenly wind that will magically make your life
better – it is you moving yourself towards/within something you are
drawn to. Passion is self-motivated action.
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