Passion: Where will it take you?

Last year I had my students tell me what they were passionate about. Some said it was their family, some their work, and one his music. I asked because, without knowledge of what drives and motivates us, we are like a person driving cross-country with no knowledge of gas stations or auto maintenance. How far will we get if we don’t know how our car runs? How far will we get in life if we don’t know what makes us run?

Before we go any further with this let’s talk about the difference between “passion” and “motivation”. What gasoline is to driving, passion is to motivation.

Are there people who live life without passion?

Yes, just as there are people who do not drive. Obviously, there are things that motivate us besides passion, but PASSION gives us even more energy than gasoline gives your favorite automobile.

My point is this: the more familiar we are with our motivation and our passions, the more control we have over our destiny. As martial artists, we cultivate a practice of meditation. We use meditation time to begin to understand ourselves, discover our passions, and find ourselves to be more than laborers, more than students, more than husbands and wives, and more than children. In short, more than the sum of the roles we play. We can begin to know our purpose and our reason for being.

By spending quiet time discovering what matters the most to us and then spending time each day reflecting on that discovery we can make huge leaps forward as students of life. We don’t have to be like the majority of people who spend their lives wandering aimlessly, not knowing that their “gas tanks” are full, or could be full very easily.

Please take a moment, an hour or so, and think about what it is that drives you. Go beyond the easy answers. Spend time with a pencil and paper and think about your life and the patterns that have shaped it.

Don’t let yourself become mired in a swamp of guilt and dissatisfaction with your life. Your life is what it is and you would not be the person that you are today without the person that you were ten or fifteen or twenty years ago. View your past without judgment to get to know yourself as you would a stranger that you might meet in a coffee shop. After you know yourself you can think about what direction your future will take.

Again, as martial artists, we are used to setting long and short-term goals. Approach your life training the same way: find something that inflames your passion and do that thing passionately. If there are changes that you want to make, write a realistic plan and implement it into your life.

The world needs more passionate people. Listen to your internal guidance.