There's Passion, and then there's PASSION

A friend of mine who is teaching a young adult's class on the topic of Passion, asked me for my thoughts on the subject just a few minutes ago, and I thought I would share those on here as well.

It is interesting actually that just last night I attended a talk on the subject of the Importance of Male Friendships, and the speaker (Mr. David Bentall) explained that he really isn't a very relational person - he describes himself as a "Task-Oriented Functionary" who had to put a lot of effort into learning how to build and maintain a frienship. It is a concept that I think applies to all kinds of things, including this.

So here is what I told my friend about Passion:

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I think the idea of passion is highly misunderstood by most people as being simply a strong feeling about something, but I think there is a lot missing from that definition. Passion, to me, involves two things, one of them is the emotional feeling you have about whatever it is you are passionate about. Of course, feelings of passion cause you to feel excited and moved by whatever it is, which is important, but not always necessary. The other part of passion involves commitment and practice.

I'm sure that somewhere in a person's mind they recognize these two things, but in my experience, 99% of the people on earth seem to emphasize FEELING passionate or being passionately committed, and I think that in reality this is very backwards. Ideally, both of those things should be present, but if you have to have one without the other, committment will win every time.

Case in point - my writing. I felt very passionate about the idea of writing a novel for probably 5 or 6 years. I pondered it passionately and dreamt about it passionately and talked about it passionately with other people. I even gave myself the title of "writer" or "novelist" during that period. And yet, for all my feelings of passion, I hadn't written a single word of my book. With that kind of passion alone, I could never succeed at the very thing I was most passionate about, because I would never get it off the ground.

There came a point where I thought to myself "okay - I have all these passionate ideas about what I'd like to write, but for some reason I just haven't done it - I need to learn how to make this more than just something I feel passionate about, but also something that I DO passionately." So I started my blog and made a start. I had forced myself to put something in place that would force me to DO something with my passionate feelings. But it wasn't enough. At the rate I was going, it would take me 30 years to finish my book, because my feelings of passion for it ebbed and flowed, as they must do naturally. When they were flowing, I'd write like a madman, and when they were ebbing I'd be on hiatus for weeks or months at a time.

And this is where I taught myself to not only feel passionately about what I was doing, but to passionately commit to it. I committed to devoting every lunch hour I had to going around the corner to Radar's Roost and writing for that time. That simple act of committment has made all the difference, not only in the quantity and speed, but also in the quality of my writing.

My feelings of passion still come and go, but because I am passionately committed to what I am doing, I still get it done, every lunch hour. Every lunch hour, whether I feel like it or not, I go sit down with my laptop and I write. During times when both the feeling and the committment are working together wonderful things happen, but when the feeling is gone, the passion remains.

Love is a very similar idea. There are feelings of love, which come and go (after three years of marriage I can attest to the fact that those lovey-dovey feelings are absent more often than present a lot of the time), but the TRUE definition of love is not a feeling at all, it is a committment which remains.

People who have affairs often blame this on the "passion of the moment", but I think this is a complete cop-out. What they were feeling wasn't passion, it was lust, hormones and a lack of commitment not only to their spouse, but to the person they were sleeping around with and to God.

So I guess what I am saying is that in order for passion to endure, we do need to LEARN how to make it stay, even when we don't feel like it.