Passion has become the word du jour in our culture. We’re all supposed to wake up screamingly happy and driven with passion-filled purpose. Quite frankly, it sounds exhausting.

I kind of like my slow roll into the day…cappuccino and journal in hand, a little quiet sitting, a gradual awakening. Gone are my yesteryear working days of that damned alarm clock where I’d immediately start humming, “…hit the ground running.”

Seriously. That woman. Just thinking about my younger self makes me so damn tired. And besides that, my former self was driven by a paycheque…not purpose.

Which brings me to this latest version of myself; a version where I paint a little, write a little, walk a little, travel a while.

 
Recently, I watched this video and a light bulb lit up my brain.
 

Isn’t that wonderful? She’s simply talking about being curious. Just following your curiousity. It’s so much quieter than our big ol’ American Bandstand version of passion.

I like the idea of just going with what currently is interesting. I remember how our dearly departed Miz Maggie the wonderdog, would slam her nose to the ground and start running. She’d sniff and snort her way to magnificent piles of dirt, bunny trails and the odd bone that she’d competely forgotten about until just this very second! She’d look over at me with her ears flying and sparks flying from her eyes.

It was wonderful to watch her delight.

Our recent Balkan trip felt like this for me. I would follow threads of learning, random novels, nuggets of history, all of it coming together and helping me begin to fathom what had always felt so unknowable to me. Not all of this was always pleasant, it is, after all, a very violent history. But it all helped add layers to my understanding of the world.

During our month away, I once again found myself taking photos of laundry. Looking back at some of my photos over the years, I realize this has been an ongoing theme.

Now. I could have just dismissed it as silly and stopped, but I liked the idea of following my curiousity. Lo and behold, as I posted them to Instagram, I discovered other lovers of laundry line photos. I found more of my tribe…a tribe I didn’t even know was out there.

 

 

Would you call that a passion? Not really. And if it had to be a capital ‘P’ passion, then I’d feel like it wasn’t enough. But every time I snapped a good laundry photo and shared it…I smiled.

And that, my friends, is worth something right there.

So how about we take the pressure off of this whole passion thing? If you are one of those burningly-passionate people, well please, carry on. That’s wonderful. Besides, when it really is a screaming passion, you really don’t have any choice but to flame on with it. It’s not likely that it was something you had to look for. It’s more like something that found you.

Our world needs those wildly passionate people and perhaps there are simply different times for different states of being.

 

 

But right now, for me, I just want to be more open to possibility. What if we all just become a little more curious?

Try following a new thread. Take a drawing class. Pick up an instrument. Learn to knit. Try a new recipe. You don’t even have to leave home if you don’t want to, everything is online and available. If you want to learn it, it’s out there.

One of those things might lead to something else and soon you’re carving a unique and special path.

Let’s follow those crumbs of curiousity…you never know what might make you smile.

 

 

“And – maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein…but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end – and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?” – from The Goldfinch by Donna Tart