Unsquelching Passion

Unsquelching Passion

How’s your passion today? Are you feeling it? How do you feel when you are passionate about something?

One of the joys of being human is having passions. I love how I can be passionate about something little and silly like a puzzle game, to something important to me like my qigong practice, to something big and meaningful like writing to you each day.

Because we are people, we have an astonishing capacity for passion.

What makes me passionate? How do I express my enthusiasm? Why am I creative?

What’s that? Creative? What does creativity have to do with passion? One thought I have is that I can be creative without passion, but it’s pretty hard for me to be passionate without being creative.

Some of us acquired some mislearning that says being passionate is bad. Perhaps we got nailed for being spontaneous. Perhaps we practiced our creativity on the walls in markers or crayons, and got punished. So we learned that spontaneity is bad. We learned not to make a move unless we had a plan.

We are asking ourselves questions like, “Why do I hold back? What makes me hide my light? Why do I suppress me?” (These are bad creative questions. Do not practice these. If you are, flip ‘em into good ones!)

There are a lot of ways that we learn to stifle ourselves. Fear is often a big one. Fear of punishment, fear of disapproval, fear of getting in trouble, fear of failure, fear of rocking the boat.

Oo. That’s a big one for some of us. We want to try at all costs to maintain a status quo, a status quo that may not be very supportive of us living our best life. We have an idea that we don’t like change.

The irony lies in the fact that we often go to extraordinary lengths to keep the appearance of sameness. At the very least, we have to deny a ton of stuff, because, whereas we can find ways to avoid taxes, and, while we are alive, we avoid death, we sure as shootin’ can’t avoid change. Our very bodies are in constant flux.

When I choose to flow with my life, rather than trying to harness it, I start to enjoy being spontaneous again. I may not choose to color on my walls with crayons, I may not choose to walk away from my job. What I have been doing lately, with a heavy schedule and not a lot of free time, is scheduling time for spontaneous decisions. It sounds like a contradiction, but what it means is that I have time each week to do anything I want. I may take a little road trip, or act like a tourist in my own town. I may take a class, or go on an adventure, or shut myself up in my house and hibernate. The point is that I get to be spontaneous, I get to practice my creative mind, and I get to think of ways to squish as much fun into what I do as I can.

How have I changed from squelching my spontaneity to embracing my passions and creativity?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 05182014