Feeding Passions

If you really like something it is easy to glue your attention to it. If you love, like, adore someone, same thing; you do nearly everything to remain in contact, close to, interact with.

Passion. Usually we think of passion as related to personal relationship, as in love and adore someone, leading even to sexual desire and lust. That’s not what I’m referring to. No. I am referencing deep personal interest and extravagant attraction to an area of interest, ideas, or things.  A passion for cars is one example, or football, or music. Absorbing interest. The kind of attraction not easily ignored.

Music provides a paradigm. Imagine a long-ago favorite musical piece plays on the radio, you know, one of those programs is playing favorites from eras long past. “Love is Blue” is such a tune for me. If I heard that being played I’d place myself in several places in the late 1960’s, maybe 1968 – winter or spring? I was deeply involved in a career switch, entering the seminary, and dating the beautiful girl who would become my wife at the end of 1968. Memories of that year flood into being.

That’s a passion, the musical trigger to memories, but rooted in the music itself.

My passions have often been tied to music. Still are.

But academic pursuits provide a source of passion as well. Ask the learned mathematician when his eyes space out as he calculates numbers and relationships of them to things unimaginable to us! Or the historian who takes one tiny bit of information and diagrams how it came to be and why it is important for us to recall and ponder anew.

That’s the kind of passion I’m talking about. What makes an electronics gamer lose hours – even days – at a gaming console? What drives a computer geek to program endlessly obscure machine languages to perfect an electronic function? Or locate a programming error and fix it. The geek’s mind takes over and obsesses until the object of his interest is satisfied. At least temporarily!

There is an old adage that states: “Follow your passion and you will never work a day in your life.”

That adage is true. If you love to paint buildings you will expend a lot of energy working the job, but you most likely won’t feel it because you are doing what you want to do and find deep enjoyment and satisfaction in it. Same with a cabinetmaker. Or artist. Lots of hard labor but the vision drives the mind to the end result relentlessly. So much so the artist doesn’t realize the time flying by.

The same is true for people who feed a special interest. My son in law is passionate about guitars. He builds them. Buys old ones and rehabs them. He designs new ones and creates them. He buys and trades special guitars that hold historical or technical importance. He plays them, too, even composing the music from whiffs of air and yearning. Pretty special!

My mother played the piano by ear. She had formal training, too, but she played from memory what she heard and remembered. Quite fully and richly. She can still do that limitedly at 101 years of age! It is her passion. The music. Classical and popular, but music that speaks to the inner self. She hears it; can you?

The internet carried a story recently of a 17 year old who was interested in chemical compounds and how they can and could address medical needs. He came up with a polymer gel that stops bleeding from open wounds, instantly. He is now, at 23, the CEO of his own company working in this field. We would call him brilliant. But I wonder if we should first think of him as passionate! What fueled his interest that eventually yielded his discovery? How long was this passion working in his brain before it yielded results?

Think of the more interesting modern companies that are inventing whole new industries today. Their work cultures are fully on display and they entice young workers to enter what seems like a formless society and organizational structure. They are allowed to work as they please. They find objectives to work toward and unimpeded find solutions and processes that fulfill the once elusive objective. They are explorers. They discover. They are passion-filled and passion driven to do something not obvious to you and I.

They are the lucky ones. They are self discovering and self sustaining. They will find satisfaction in a way of living that matters most to them. It may not bring massive financial rewards, although it is likely this will occur! But that is not their passion – making money. No, it seems they are passionate about the act of discovering, of making sense of something. In doing that they share the fruit of their labor and we learn it is good.

Rather than going to school and learning about facts and things, maybe we ought to focus more on teaching the student how to learn for himself, to broaden his world view and understanding of it. And then let him or her free to create what he will.

America has been good at building things, manufacturing things, creating art and design and a lot of science. What have we been slow to be good at? Thinking, ideating and expanding the functionality of the society and world around us. We have been focused on money as reward, not creativity and usefulness.

Imagine a world that cares that its people feel passionate about each other and the development of personal ability? Would this passion bring positive or negative results for the masses? Rather than worry about the downside, maybe we should work harder at sparking the passion in the first place?

At least can we try?

September 2, 2015