March 26. Fire: Passion and Drive
What Size is Your Flame?
My parents rarely tempered themselves. They often ran impulsively from one passion to the next, from one home, one job, and one interest to the next, and all their children were expected to keep up. It is no surprise that I, their child, became a replica of them, unable to stop the inertia within.
There is a line between passion and obsession.
Related Expertise
“…with harmonious passion you know that you have control over whether or not you participate in the activity and choose to incorporate it into your life every day. Instead of overtaking the entirety of one’s life, it can exist and interact with all other aspects of a person’s life harmoniously. So someone who is really passionate about making music can still go to work every day, go to the grocery store, spend time with family, but then come home and play music for a few hours. If it was obsessive passion, the person would often feel the compulsion to engage in making music instead of doing all of those other things. When we’re obsessed with something, that thing cannot interact with any other aspect of our life harmoniously (Vallarand, 2008).
Inspired Action
If your passion becomes an obsession, and is taking over your life, your job, your family, your health, or your finances, perhaps it is time to take stock of its distortion.
Consider which way your passions lean – in harmony with other aspects of your life, or obsessively neglecting those other aspects? There is a chance that obsessing is a form of avoidance. What other things are you avoiding by your over-involvement with this one thing? Take time to list all of the parts of your life that are important, even if you currently feel out of balance.
We want to find a way to get at our passions without those fires burning the whole thing down.
If you like this post, subscribe to isaglade.com for free collaborative daily mediations from our van life in The Goat.