A life devoid of passion is not even a real shade of color. It’s pallor is dull and it becomes hard to look at and hard to live. It can make you physically ill when your days are perceived as drudgery and the thrill of whimsy is nowhere to be found. What is there to look forward to? Why even exist? What’s the point? You see where I’m going with this.
Does this mean that you should quit your day job immediately and join the circus? Probably not. You might be an actual human that has actual needs like food eating and bill paying for a roof over your head. The facts are that you might have a job you hate. You might have more than one job and hate them both. You might get up earlier than the crows and commute too far and spend the bulk of your day with people you don’t care for doing things you couldn’t care less about. Because money.
Expecting that to change in the near future might not be feasible. It might never change.
That doesn’t mean you can’t love your day, love yourself and live with passion. It just means you’ll have to be smarter and work harder at first to achieve it. Or not. I’ve seen people make a change in perspective and feel immediate results.
So, here’s the thing. Because this life is built on the cash-for-goods-and-services model, and I’m assuming you want to live in this life and not a pretend one, you gotta work with it and not against it.
Everyone can find one thing they like about their day. Everyone. If you hate the job, maybe you have a nice view on the way there. If you hate the people, maybe there’s a great coffee place nearby. But look, the onus is on you to find it. No one can do it for you. This is like when you’re eight and it’s summer and your mom is the one trying to come up with something for you to do and she lists a frillion things and NONE of them are GOOD ENOUGH and you HATE TODAY.
Your mom could never and did never find that thing you wanted to do. Because she’s not you. And then suddenly you felt like reading books in the cherry tree and it was the best idea ever invented. Because you thought of it.
This is your rodeo, Hoss. You have to find your own joy and your own passion. Take your complaining and hate for your life in hand and show them to the door. They weigh a million pounds and are like a dark cloud over your head and make your immune system depressed. They make you more prone to illness, both physical and mental.
If you have to sit in traffic in your car for hours, start listening to a book on tape and educate yourself in something. Maybe it’s a skill that you can use in after-hours and maybe it’s something you just really wanted to learn for the heck of it. It doesn’t matter. You like it.
If you ride the bus, grab your notebook and sketch people. If you are a janitor, spend your time listening to poetry in your headphones and take pictures of weird trash or take up whittling. I don’t know. But, you get the point. This is up to you to find. And if you can’t find one, single, solitary thing about your day that you can like, you will continue being ill.
But, when you do find that thing, that one thing you can truly love, start telling someone about it. Express your passion about it. Love it into reality. Because it’s when we express our passions and loves that it makes them stronger and we feel it and we actually get healthier and happier in the process.
There’s also a kind of magic that happens when we talk about our dreams out loud. The Universe hears us and wants to help make our dreams come true. People can’t hear your passion if you don’t say it out loud. And so you’d never know that the friend of a friend has a little cottage by the beach where you could stay for free if you’d just house-sit for a week this summer and when you’re there you’ll get to take photos all the live-long day. You just don’t know. Good things want to come your way. Believe it.
Speak your truth to the Universe, be unattached to the outcome, and have the expectation of something good.
What’s the difference between daydreaming, making wishes or goals for the future versus expecting the best but being unattached to the outcome and finding one thing, right this minute, that you can be happy about?
Hoping and a’wishin’ and a’dreamin’. Well, none of that is in the moment and none of that is actively working towards a goal. It could actually become distracting from the present moment if you don’t watch yourself for balance.
It’s great to send out a desire and expectation to the Universe, but then move on and be in the moment, right where you are, and experience it. Appreciate it. Synthesize your own happiness. Share it with others. Make connections. People who live in the moment are much happier than those that daydream all day.
Imagine Something Good
Think back to when you were in grade-school and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up. Imagine you telling that person, “More than anything else, I will be healthy and happy.” Make a list of everything that makes you healthy and happy. If your list is short, work on that.