Thoughts on passion

It seems to me that life can be described in many ways, but one way that has been highlighted recently is categorizing life into two forms, those with and without passion. It takes a special kind of person to leave the comforts of home and do work with foreign people in a foreign land. Now, before it starts sounding too much like I’m patting myself on the back let me say that I’m not sure I’m the best kind of person for this kind of work, I may not even be a good kind. I could see, within 24 hours, the passion that my group of volunteers had for the task they were committing themselves to. It may not have been as evident for each character in the story of Peace Corps Tanzania Education class 2009, but there was a genuine willingness to do meaningful work. The problem is simple; passion fades. If excitement were constant, it wouldn’t be important. So the question is what goes beyond passion, beyond excitement. Passion is an intensely powerful force. It makes the irrational rational, the general unique, and the stupid quite reasonable. It can be found for ultimately anything, a sport, a work of art, a career, a god, and hopefully for each of us, a person. It can also be incredibly unhealthy, as passion for a multitude of things destroys multitudes of lives every day. However, what I have been struggling with as of late is an unfulfilled passion for passion. It is incredibly easy to do something when your entire body delights in its required action. However, the self-control required to push yourself through those times when you feel passion-less is a challenge I have yet to master. Compounding this problem is successful procrastination. Nothing reinforces laziness as effectively as successfully avoiding work without consequence. So, back to PC TZ ED 09. It’s easy to be excited and passionate on the bus ride to the airport before leaving, but day 179 in country is a better measure for the passions of your group. Are the motivations still the passion for the world? Or now perhaps your passion is for a job that pays you a living wage, even if it is in a third world country. Do two people with those very different fuels for their fires have any difference in the outcome? If both motivations are equally as strong, passion, in theory, will produce the same product. Ignoring the capitalist argument about the second person needing to be rewarded with more money for more work, it would seem that those benefiting from each volunteer get the same thing out of the deal. So then, does it matter why we’re here, assuming, of course, that each gives their best effort? Does it matter what passion is driving our work, as long as we’re getting the work done? Honestly, I know it’s more complicated than the presence or absence of relevant passion but when you’re facing the paper piles that must be graded, or read, or cleaned, passion for doing what you must is an incredible boost.

UPDATE: The advantages of not posting right away are I get to kind of read between the lines of what I wrote later. Basically this was my way of venting on how I can't motivate myself very often, but hoping that the ensuing IST would. For more on that, read above!