Halftime Talks: Passionate: What's Cliche vs Real?

Follow you passion. Find a profession you can be passionate about. Follow your heart. Discover what you love and do it daily. I couldn't agree more with those statements but admittedly they have become cliche. The tread on their tires have worn off and their grip to the road is completely non-existent. We just need some new tires in order to get the necessary traction. That's the danger of this falling prey to the popculturification of things. The callous use of the word PASSION really jumped out to me while having a conversation with an early 20-something about his college experiences. We previously engaged in a deep conversation right after he graduated high school over 1 1/2 years ago. Now we began to revisit the previous conversation and update each other on what's transpired in between the time. As I began to ask him questions about his major and projected career, things began to shift. I could see the sincerity of his response but it all lack a layer of emotional substance. "Im a Physical Therapy major. When I graduate, I'll definitely be pursuing a job I can be passionate about." His answer fit the typical groove of one of these conversations but the only thing my brain kept screaming out was BULLSHIT. At that point I have to bring the conversation to a difinitive point of elevation. I stopped him mid-sentance and asked him a barrage of questions. Do you know what passion is? What's the last thing you can remember being passionate about? How did that feel? What were you willing to do or become in order to continue the relationship with it? Those questions established a baseline for the passion that had been experienced. Without trying to define PASSION we activated something more real that a defination. I could see a light emerge in his eyes while going in describing his passions. He brightened up. My next step was to purposely interupt the moment and his pattern of thinking. How do you get just as passionate about PHYSICAL THERAPY as you have about this previous subject? Or else you're at risk of just having a job. And ultimately rendering inert your desire for finding a profession you could feel passionate about. As he instinctively wanted to react with a statement, I stopped him and requested that he let it sink in. He paused and began to all this to absorb in. His next words we, "DAMN." There is some things you must experience in order to fully understand them. Historically there have been social practices and rites of passage each memnber of thge community had to participate in. The rituals were not writen down because knowing the answer was different that having a deep understanding of the answer. An answer that connected to experience is capable of bridging the figurative gap. Passion is a state of being where enthusiasm and behavior are united. In the state of passion your life become consumed with an adventure to discover, develop and experience perpetual experiences with the subject of our attention. That subject can be a person we are directing out love toward. The subject can be an activity, a job, a collection of works, or anything capable of capturing our attention. Passion can be less describe as a thing as much as it describes what happens to you in it. The shoulds disappear and a compulsion –