Relive The Passion

        There is a saying, not in its exact words here but as I recall it, that if your work is the same as your passion, you’d never have to work a day in your life… or so it goes…

               

True. And in fact, there is a lucky percentage of the world’s population that, as it says, doesn’t have to work a day in their lives.

So how about the greater percentage of the world’s population?

I have already known this before, but during a conversation with a very special person the other night, I was again reminded, that work and passion are two different things. Work is done, in the simplest way to express it, to fill the pocket, but in the broader sense, it is done to fulfill material needs and obligations to people who are important to you. It is the ‘bread and butter’, but the inescapable fact is that you’re doing this to feed yourself, family and anyone who depends on you. You are only feeding your body as it seems, even when your work is fulfilling.

When you fulfill your passion though, whatever it is and however remote it is from what your job is, you not only feed your stomach but your heart as well… or your soul. And yet, I am not saying that this is always the case for as I’ve written above, there are lucky people who had the good fortune to merge work and passion…

But to those who have not, well…

That special person, through our conversation, once again gave me a push, or rather a gentle nudge, to aspire for better things yet keep my feet on the ground. She asked me what is my ambition… my passion… and I was stumped. I have not thought about that in years… because, not to sound so tragic, I have been numbed through the last almost-decade from thinking about ambition… Recently, I was just happy earning enough to save and fulfill material needs and obligations and have that weekend rest. I was not able to fulfill those ambitions before due to circumstances that would be out of topic in this article. So, I couldn’t answer her at first but told her honestly about not being sure of what my passion is… And so, she gave me a ‘gentle scolding’ hehehe…

In a nutshell, she told me that one should still have time to discern your real passion in life and that he or she should set goals to fulfill them, along with the professional goals. As I wrote earlier, fulfillment of work feeds your body and fulfillment of passion feeds your soul, and for one to be completely fulfilled, well… both should be ‘well-fed’. Simply put, still find time to do what makes you happy amidst the stress of work. She told me that if I did not ‘feed’ both my body and soul, there would be regret that would manifest later on, making it difficult to be contented and might even cause problems in my future family.

And how do you discern what your passion is if you have forgotten or chose to forget it? Well, as that special person defined, it should be that thing, which, after you have done it, makes you feel… well, in the Filipino language… kilig… But it can also be just what makes you happy whenever you do even a bit of it, and it doesn’t have to be (in most cases) what you do for a living. And I was able to discern mine… I did write a novel from 2011-2013 but I wrote it as if it was a swan song for that part of me… and I very recently recorded an ‘album’ (a 2 CD one I made after I discovered late that my cellphone has high quality voice recording) I planned to entitle One Last Hurrah Before I Get So Serious… Now I’m going to scrap that title for I’ve now decided that it’s not going to be the ‘last hurrah’…

Of course, this requires time management… which may or may not be what I would write for the next article.

So… how would you fulfill your ‘body and soul?’