Passion is an eagerness to fill a need and provides an energy we can use to fuel our actions from sex to running,  studying to flying, or from doing the best we can at work to writing a book. It can feed our understanding of process and systems or allow us to connect with people.  It can allow us to keep learning in tai chi after 20 years or keep exploring our particular expertise. It can help us work with our environment in a sustainable way.   Passionate living is continually using our eagerness to create the life we want.  It fuels the actions to bridge the gap between who we are and who we want to be.  Passion comes from within and shines through our interests and longings to connection.   It is not something we make happen. Rather, passion emerges from guiding our attention to what we want or need to create.  It is an emergent property of living the life we value.

There is a property we manage every moment which can help bring about our passion.  When we direct our attention away from our suffering, worries, troubles and devils of daily affairs to what we want, passion blossoms like a flower in spring.  Like a bud out of the ground it rises out of the common woes of our life.  Feeding off of the light of our decisions and soil of our unconscious, the bud of our passion grows and strengthens.  Over time, the bud becomes a hardy plant capable of flowering.  My point in this crude poetic simile is simple.  Passion is not a switch we turn off or on.  It’s not something we can make happen.  It takes nurturing and continual refocusing of our attention onto what we want to create.  If we want to run a marathon, we have to practice daily.  If we want to learn math in 3rd grade we have to do some everyday not just in school but on our own.  To fly an airplane we have to learn all the gages, controls, communication, regulations, and workings of the airplane.  A long-term relationship takes communication and sharing of the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of ourselves. For a marriage to survive past the seven-year itch and beyond, each partner has to put energy and passion into the relationship through exploring and rekindling the desires to connect, talk and share.  Passion is an emergent property of directing our energy towards creating the vision we have for our life.  In this sense, passion is an integral part of managing the business of you.

For more information see my earlier posts:
What is Passionate Living?
How do we find our Passion?