I recently came across a couple of things speaking of passion. The first was Isabel Allende giving a TED talk telling “Tales of Passion.” The second was a blog I follow on WordPress about “The Follow Your Passion Fallacy.” Both were interesting in their own right. However, I was struck with their relation to the business of you concept. Let’s explore.

The word passion has a long history going back around five thousand years. It’s original meaning was ‘to hurt.” It was adopted by Christian theology a thousand years back and related to the sufferings of Christ on the Cross. Around the 14th century passion took on a second meaning describing ‘strong emotion or desire.’ In the 17th century sufferings of Christ morphed into suffering in general and was even related to certain aspects of the body and our suffering with ailments of various types. The other meaning of strong emotion became uncontrollable sentiment by the mid 16th century. This uncontrolled affect then evolved into sexual connotations in the late Middle English period. Thus, passion became know as not only the sexual feeling but the person who was the object of the feeling. Passion continued to change into describing a strong enthusiasm for anything. Looking into dictionaries, there are multiple meanings all driven by the context of use. Urban Dictionary struggles as there are not that many funny definitions as there usually are for words on that website.

In Isabel’s talk, passion is about approaching life with fervor and determination and highlighted with sexual enjoyment. In The GoodVader’s post, passion is about a happy and fulfilled life. The point made is that passion is not fixed or a permanent decision to be made and it’s more beneficial to take action instead of losing time trying to figure out our passion. For the business of you, passion is one of the many things we can utilize in our daily affairs to bring us closer to what we truly want. Passion feels good.  Passion helps us connect with others as well as our environment.  Passion creates an eagerness and playful energy.  If we can figure out a way to harness that energy, we can accomplish anything we put our minds to.  Passion may not necessarily be what we truly want, but it is an integral part of the mixture that fuels our creative capacity.  Passionate living is finding the playful eagerness within ourselves to live and create the life we value.