Ramstions 4 - Be Passionate

I believe that a passionate person is a happy person. I'm not necessarily referring to passion in your love life, though I believe that can be one form of this passion. The passion I'm talking is defined as boundless enthusiasm. So to restate my introductory sentence, I believe when someone really cares about what is happening in their life then they'll be happier. For me that something has changed between a lot of things in my life from hiking, to geocaching, to work, to girls, to scuba diving, to hang gliding, to photography, to a host of other things. I've always been happiest when I have one or more things that I really care about in my life. As I've aged many of the things I've been passionate about have turned into hobbies for awhile and sometimes they become my passion again. Other passions seem to get dropped entirely. This isn't how it works for everyone; I'm just stating how it is for me.

I started watching my friends and coworkers around half a year ago trying to judge their happiness level. It amazed me how much happier people are who have something to be passionate tend to be. Those people who just watch TV or doing something similar every night seem to be letting life pass them by. These are the people who when you ask them how it's going and they always say that it's just ok. These are the people that never seem to know what they are going to do next. They just float through life. Never being really happy, and never being really sad. I know most of these people would be happier if they became passionate about something, but they never seem to.

During this past half a year I've tried to figure out why this is and I've seen two reasons for it. I'm sure there are more reasons, but these are the two I've identified. The first is simply because some people seem lazy. It seems that more often than not it's not that a person is too lazy to try new things, but that they are too lazy to figure out what they want to try. This is bizarre to me because it's so easy for me to find new things that I want to do. I tend to have a list of things I want to do that is so long I keep forgetting some of the things. But I know people that that just don't try new things and it seem that laziness is the reason. The second reason I've seen people not try to find new things to become passionate about is because they've fooled themselves into thinking what they do now is good enough. For instance the people who watch lots of TV can't find time for anything else because they need to see that new show tonight.

Personally I wouldn't mind if I found something I could be passionate about for more than a year, but if I don't I guess that will just make me one fine Renaissance man. If I ever do find something that I can stay passionate about, I would never stop trying something new. Without anything new to compare what I like to, I don't think I could confidently claim that I'm passionate about anything. And when I'm not passionate about something I'll be a boring old man, which just isn't my style.

For god's sake get out there and care!