In the past, anguish overwhelmed me. It was an enemy at the gate. I wanted nothing more than the curl up in a ball and cry. Sometimes, I had suicidal impulses and fantasized about death...though I knew I was too cowardly to act on the courage of those convictions.
I had these obsidian feelings while I awaited trial for possessing MDMA, while waiting to know if I would go to prison for 40 years. I prevented myself from embracing the anguish, though. I learned to occupy my mind with positive thoughts, which consisted predominately of my passions.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Passion
I let these passions—reading, writing, traveling, living freely, and loving—override all the pain. I invoked the beauty of life by acknowledging the fact that I was truly alive; it was an existential crisis and a developmental moment. It was amazing.
During this time, I often told myself life is like climbing a set of stairs. I am always a footfall away from the next step. The space between this footfall and the next consisted of my passions. It contained the things I live for and will eventually die for, regardless of my fate.
The metaphor reminded me the whale in Douglas Adam's novel A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The whale had precious few moments to consider all the implications of life before plunging to its death.
I felt similarly. I wanted to become something akin to the whale, except I wanted to move upward. To overcome. To transcend, not to fall. But I still wanted to enjoy the whirlwind of the passions, and so that is what I did.
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Without Passion We Intensify Our Suffering; Acknowledge the Hungry Pit at Our Center
Without the kind of passion I embraced, humans would be stuck in an endless cycle of fear and attachment. They would enter into the cycle of suffering, often referred to as Samsara in Buddhist philosophy. Samsara is the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, but it omits joy and happiness until the sufferer reaches Nirvana or enlightenment. To me, enlightenment is the same as acknowledgment of passion.
When we have recovered from the trauma of waking, after escaping from the coma of the workaday trance and snapping out of business-as-usual, a carnivorous hole develops at the pit of the stomach, wanting nothing more than to devour us inside out.
This hole represents a voracious pit that has always existed in us, but that we have never recognized or were aware of. The hole only becomes hungry when the mind recognizes it, much the same way the Venus flytrap only closes upon the fly when it recognizes the fly inside of its leafy maw.
This dark hole is the emptiness that reflects our lack of passion; the passion we discover only by deepening and widening our experiences. If we fail to live with vigor and vitality—to live it to its fullest—we fail to acknowledge the hole at the center of our being, the pit that cries out for the discovery of passion with all its seething and yearning.
The Cultivation of Passion and the Creation of Love
These passions can be anything for anyone, possibly everything. They lap us up, like a dog lapping up freshly spilled beer. Passions come to define us. They instill character in an otherwise empty void.
Without passion, we turn into vacant machines, pursuing jobs and livelihoods for the sake of blind necessity or at the behest of other people. If we fail to grow through experience and develop ourselves as human beings, we fail to navigate life with truest sense of being. Our souls become burdened with anguish and a death wish may appear in the mind's eye.
Once we start to cultivate experience through passion, though, we begin to notice how different we are from the rest of society. We start to realize how alive we truly are; how beautiful the world is, and how much love fills our hearts.
Seek unique and diverse experiences via the passions. Do not fear life for life's sake, even when the odds are bleak. Develop love of life and move in for the kill. People fill life with danger and horror, which when it appears is all they see. Life is beautiful even through all the haze of the seeming pain and suffering, if only the recognize the pit and fulfill the need.
Send the fearful and depressed life packing. Do not wind up as another cog in the broken machine of the world. Reject business-as-usual. Own the impassioned life. Replicate it. Devour it. Inhale and exhale. Spread the good word outward, as far as passion goes. This is the spiritual path that leads to the creation of great art, beauty, value, compassion, and love. This is how people survive; more than survive—It is how they become whole human beings. Is how I survived, evolved, and transcended.
Do not be left with that pit unacknowledged and unsatisfied. Embrace Passion. Maya Angelou said it best:
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.