Life is about passion.
Tomorrow, there will be a post that links to an article about meeting someone in a coffee shop. No, I haven’t met someone! Rather, it’s an article about how to meet someone. I tend to associate that sort of thing with passion. The passion of need, of possession. Of two becoming one. But, I have to be honest, my idea of passion has always included more than that.
Okay, sure, you’re thinking “Hey, a divorced, middle-aged, white guy who makes a living by being geekier than the average geek survives cancer and thinks he’s suddenly qualified to ramble on about passion”, right? Well, it’s not that. I’ve been hurting for something to be passionate about since the sixth grade. Oh, I get obsessed with things, sure. Some small, obscure subject will fascinate me for a few weeks or months and I’ll go through a cycle of knowing as much as I can about whatever it is before it bores me and it becomes something that gathers metaphorical dust in the attic of my mind, if I’m lucky. If I’m not lucky, it gathers actual dust on my coffee table. This is how I account for my owning both the complete, original John Byrne run of Alpha Flight, the collected Prisoner, the Dune Encyclopedia and Space: Above and Beyond. It’s also how I learned Perl and Linux and wrote plugins for WordPress. That same cycle is how I learned about survival, security, self-defense, koi, philosophy, and just about anything else interesting that I know. But, none of it really lasts. It’s just a flash of white-hot passion, then it’s gone.
What I long for, what I’ve always longed for, is something that makes me feel passionate forever. And, yes, I thought I had that when I was married, but, well, it turned out that passion was misplaced. So, now I wonder if all of it was misplaced. If it was all a useless, empty quest to find passion that is impossible to grasp. Before I met my ex-wife, I felt that passion about my work, but, after losing a job that was my life, I discovered work was just a job. So, now, I’m left searching, seeking, hunting that elusive passion which seems so slippery.
So, in spite of what you’ll read in this space tomorrow, I don’t ever want to sink all that passion into a person, of either sex, again. And, any thing or activity that I allow myself to be passionate about again will have to be something that can’t be taken away from me. Work comes and goes.
But writing… Well, if I were to lose this blog, this laptop that I’m writing from, I could still write. A cheap notebook and stub of a pencil stolen from Ikea is enough. The words, the hammering out of the words, sentences, paragraphs, that takes no special tools, only, well, the passion. So, too, God. Even fewer tools to seek God. I can find His presence anywhere, anytime. Again, what matters is the passion for the spiritual connection, the seeking God’s presence. But, how? What to write? How to find God? What step to take next?
Who knows? I suppose I’ll find out if I keep after it, that search for passion. So, dear readers, what makes you light up with that passion for living? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are."
--Clive James
