Are You Sick of "Finding your Passion?"

How many times have I heard someone tell me "I want to find my passion." as they hopped from job to job or stayed home with their favorite friend, In Ternet. I've also wandered around in my mind hoping my passion would spring out from behind some lost memories and shout, "Here I am, your passion!" only to be disappointed by vague ideas, so vague I wouldn't even call them ideas, more like fuzziness of the mind.

It's everywhere, like a new age-religion, "Find your passion!". Oprah Winfrey, a woman having found her passion makes the big bucks off of people who haven't found theirs yet and who tune in to find out how her special guests have figure it out. Our collective obsession with the rat race and consumption hasn't yielded any happiness, just a mountain of stuff, bills, stress, weight, illness and loneliness and we wonder where the missing link is. Where IS my darn passion, anyways?

How enviously we watch from the sidelines those who have found their passion, still benched from the game. Those friends and strangers who seem full of purpose and energy, hypnotized by what they love, hardly whimper when a barrier gets in their way because stopping to do what they are doing would be ludicrous, like stopping to breathe. So how do I get on that team?

Recently I have found that I may have a couple of hours of free time during the week, so I promptly put myself to task. Okay. Let's find some passion somewhere and squeeze it in there between taking the kid to school and writing postcards to my friends. Alright, should be easy enough, volunteering at an orphanage in the slums, going back to school online, taking a puppet show on the road.  Sounds more like the same old rat race....

Passions are easier to see in others than in yourself and they hardly ever show up as a job, at least not a first. Here's a list of my friends' passions: helping pregnant women birth, making art, ideas, writing, educating kids, helping people find their career path, mathematics, running marathons, academics, wine, raising funds, supporting a family, owning and flying a plane, repairing an old car, eating healthy, singing and the list goes on. If you asked my friends, "What's your passion?" some could answer and some wouldn't know what to say. They are just doing what they've always been doing.

The tricky thing about "finding your passion" is the "finding" part, as if it's hidden far away, like it must be a hobby I've never tried,  in a country I've never been or as a result of a life-changing event that hasn't happened yet. Yes, that's it! My passion must be making cheese by hand in a monastery in a remote village in the Alps, I just don't know it yet! Well, I used to think this way, but now I think I've figured it out.

Passion is not an activity that you do, it's HOW you do everything that you do. It's not about "finding" it's about "doing with all your heart." It's that simple. Want to "find" your passion, then put more passion into your daily activities. So how do we do this?

Imagine you have to make dinner for your family. You can A- Put a frozen pizza in the oven and rip open a salad-in-a bag. Or B- You can open the fridge, look at the variety of food waiting to be transformed, you can try combinations of foods you haven't tried before, cut fruits or veggies in different way, use spices, pull out your fancy serving plates, light a candle, put on some music, crack open a bottle of wine and even get the kid involved. Option A gets the task done. Option B is full of passion. Does it mean that you have to sign up for cooking classes, go to France to learn the intricacies of puff pastry, write your own cookbook and star on your own television show? Not tonight. Maybe later, but the point is that by "putting passion" into making your dinner, you have "found your passion."

By generating your own passion and smothering your whole day with it, you will transform even the most seemingly mundane routine days. Soon some activities will shine a little brighter than others; maybe it's reading stories to your kid, maybe it's cleaning out your junk drawer, maybe it's leading a staff meeting, who knows, just keep spreading more passion onto it, take more time to enjoy it, read another story, clean the other junk drawer, throw a joke in your presentation and soon you won't be looking for your passion anymore. It will be with you always.

So what to do in those two hours of free time? I think I'll just write more fantastic postcards to my friends.

postcard perfect picture, no?