Passion or Suffering
I’m sitting here, outside of a 45 person yoga class I just checked in. I feel scattered. Torn between going out to get food and continuing my hunt for interesting and amazing writers on the internet.
I got started on this brain path when a woman came in this morning and refused to fill out any of the new student waiver except her signature and date. I was so curious I looked her up. I found out that she has an online presence and an offline presence in the world. And it had me question — is she paranoid about random people having her info? Are we (am I) naivve for giving out my info so casually?
And that’s as far as I got on that train. Because I got side swiped by another thought— I want to be a seeable, hearable presence online and in the world. So now I’m looking at what are these big presences doing that I am not. And the answer I got is the answer I always get which is — leaning into the fear! Every time.
I’m a passionate person. And I have many moments where I see I want to say something, or do something out of the norm. When I do the thing, life opens up. It’s like magic on crack. When I don’t do the thing, my life continues on quietly and easily, with low to moderate levels of silent suffering. If I am going through this, and I am a pretty expressive person, I can only imagine what others are going through.
The root of the word ‘passion’ is ‘suffering’.
I learned this because I found out just how much being a passionate woman defines me.
So I looked up the word. The first definition of passion is: strong and barely controllable emotion. The second definition is: the suffering and death of Jesus. (Who, I think we can safely assume, was an intensely passionate person.)
The definition of suffering is: the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.
I think that suffering is one experience of passion. Passion is a fact of life, like having a body and breathing. Suffering happens when the flow of passion is stifled in any way. It ccould be extremely painful. Or it could just be directionless apathy. It depends on how committed to your passion you are. If you’re all in, you experience restriction intensely. If you only partly leaned in, it’s like the little tickles of a candle flame — slight discomfort.
