A very wise person once told me that work will make me feel like a rat in a wheel unless I have passion for what I do. Right now I feel more like a rat in a Skinner Box than in a wheel, but I am interested in exploring the concept of passion.
What comes to mind when you think of passion?
When I think of passion, ideas of love, kissing, touching, sex, and intense feelings enter into my mind. Work on the other hand, does not.
Because I am curious about what passion even means, I decided to consult with the fountain of wisdom, the knower of all things, the keeper of all facts: Google.
According to Google's sexiest consort Wikipedia, passion is derived from the Latin verb patior, which means to suffer or to endure. I didn't make this up, it's true (you can click the link, it won't hurt my feelings if you do).
In imagining myself on Freud's couch playing a game of word association, the terms 'suffering' and 'endurance' evoke sharp reminders of work. So in that sense, the wise person who popped into my mind and precipitated this inquiry was right. Hard work does require suffering, and they make sure of that in school.
But in another sense, this worries me. Does passion (by definition) require suffering? Can we love intensely without having to "endure" another, or making them endure us?
If passion is supposed to be the shelter from the storm, how can we reconcile the fact that the storm lives inside of us and is awoken from its dormant state in the very moment that we begin to love intensely?
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