Passion Is Overrated; What Matters Is What Lasts After
What makes it worth our pursuit?
At some point in our lives, we have all heard and believed in the importance of passion, in anything that we go after, or in anything that comes after us.
While it is true of passion to be a trigger for many of our pursuits, it is perhaps given more weight than it is capable of fulfilling.
In other words, passion is something we associate much of our unrealistic expectations with;
Passion is overrated.
We might even think that having a passion for anything can get us through to the destination we seek.
In doing so, we think that passion is capable of releasing us from what we try so hard to avoid;
We think that passion is the one-word answer to surpass routine, boredom, pain, and sadness;
Until that very passion turns into what we try so hard to avoid feeling.
Everything that begins fades eventually, but continues nonetheless.
Passion can be the reason for the beginning of our pursuits, but to make our pursuits truly sustainable, we need to understand what’s worth continuing (and why) when our passion comes to its inevitable end.
In his book, ‘The 5 Love Languages’, Gary Chapman writes;
“We have been led to believe that if we are really in love, it will last forever. We will always have wonderful feelings that we have at this moment.
…Unfortunately, the eternality of the “in-love” experience is fiction, not fact. The late psychologist Dr. Dorothy Tennov conducted long-range studies on the in-love phenomenon. After studying scores of couples, she concluded that the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years.
…Once the experience of falling in love has run its natural course (remember the average in-love experience lasts two years), we will return to the world of reality and begin to assert ourselves.”
Although, Gary Chapman writes this in context of romantic relationships between couples, if we really think about it, this holds true of any of our pursuits;
Whether it is a new hobby we take up, a new side-hustle we venture into, or even move to a new place;
It all begins with a fire inside us, with a love we think will remain unchanged, and most importantly, with a feeling we think we will continue to feel forever.
Gary Chapman goes on to write;
“We can recognize the in-love experience for what it was — a temporary emotional high — and now pursue “real love” with our spouse.
That kind of love is emotional in nature but not obsessional. It is a love that unites reason and emotion.
…That kind of love requires effort and discipline. It is the choice to expend energy and effort to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you too will find a sense of satisfaction — the satisfaction of having genuinely loved another. It does not require the euphoria of the “in-love” experience.
In fact, true love cannot begin until the “in-love” experience has run its course.”
The passion we tend to feel at the very beginning of our pursuits, is nothing but momentary;
It is not something we can depend on, for our pursuits to sustain the test of time, and the test of our efforts.
To come to terms with the truth of the transience of passion, is to begin truly pursuing what matters to us.
What we start out with, needs to be transformed into something that has the power to lead us on in our journeys.
Passion may be the answer to the direction we need to turn to, but that may be all that it is;
A lamp that guides us through as we begin;
And as we go on, the fire in the lamp may run out, but we need to keep figuring out tools that help us continue along that journey.
What makes it worth our pursuit, only begins to come into light when passion eventually fades into darkness.
All we need to do is, open up to discovering ways that make our pursuits exciting, when the mundane gets in our way.
It is not really the end when passion finally walks out the door of our sweet homes, for it was a guest all this while;
It is the beginning of learning to make our homes sweeter with all that we have to give, until maybe passion does decide to be our guests for another short vacation.
Passion helps us write the first few pages of the stories we wish to write, but we need to figure out ways to continue writing our stories thereafter, and that is what makes it worth our pursuit.
It is not what we start out with, but what remains for long after we started out.
