PASSIONATE CONFUSION.
Working on my experience of “passion” and the meaning that such sentiment/virtue has on me, it becomes evident that such a word has reached enormous popularity and significant abuse.
“Passion”, the deep feeling and understanding of the human heart, is today the ketchup poured on most of the conversation to add flavour and colour quickly. Everybody on every media and social channel seems to recommend “passion” as the best drug to overcome daily life’s banality and monotony.
Under “passion” lies a vast taxonomy covering hobbies, pastimes, sports, collections, evasions, entertainments, till obsessions. A list of passions that is easy to understand when we consider the doldrum in which the industrial revolution, the electronic evolution and the society of consumption & waste pushed humanity.
We live in “routines” from waking up to the family life to the working life, to the social life, and even to the relationship life.
The “slave time” pushes out any passion from what we do: rarely one meets people passionate about bookkeeping, road maintenance, delivery of Amazon goods or serving hamburgers. And we are obliged to find passion in our “free time” in a schizophrenic move where “adventure, risk and evasion” become the way of adding the spark. After riding a motorcycle at 250 km/h in a circuit, we return covered with a passion for “normal life”, and we can start preaching with all the adrenaline still in our veins.
Usually, when we separate the self in two parts (one acting with passion and the other paying for the mortgage), we fall into a confusing and anxious dimension: here, “passion” becomes something we can experience without thinking, self-examination, or consciousness. Quite different is the “passion experience” of people following what they consider a vocation, a call to improve the world and humanity as much as possible: doctors, inventors, artists, writers, legislators, teachers, scientists, and explorers follow in total self-unity a call that gives them joy and, why not, real passion (capacity of feeling).
A time ago, a friend told me that instead of passion, we should use a derivate from the same stem: “compassion”. And how right he was: by adding the simple prefix “cum” (with), we understand the deep meaning of sincere passion: the sharing of a vision, of a project, of an idea with a fellow human or a community.
It is the sharing and, simultaneously, the discovery of meaning.
Victor Frankl wrote: “To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”.
Now “passion” assumes global coverage: every moment of our life must have an element of tension of equal passion, and such sentiment should be, in my experience, applied only to fundamental necessities and needs. We are not “two in one”, maybe “many in one”, but surely I am one and the same heart Tuesday morning and Saturday afternoon. And there is no free time for passion, full time or boredom.
The search for meaning, for what is significant, for what gives a sense to our acts, is passion in pure, uncut form. It can be present under any circumstance.
I want this passion to guide all my acts and take advantage of what I decide to do in my “slave and free time”, from loving wife to riding motorcycle. I want to be passionate about what my heart demand: honesty, justice, equality, charity, sincerity, and knowledge.
In this search and this awareness, there is no need for extreme sports or running a sport to the extreme; there is no need for exotic places or faraway beaches, no space for adventure stickers on your vehicles or record-breaking challenges.
Passion must be with us when we clean the house, when we talk with friends when we sleep.
Passion does not add anything to life; it is life.
And the last word to Victor Frankl: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognise that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible”
