Passion

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Is there a fire in your life? A passion that draws you, demands that you wake and get out of bed? Is it raging? Is it smoldering? How do you recognize it? How do you feel about it? What do you do with it?
Is this fire a good thing or a bad thing?

These are life questions, imortant to both our happiness and our quality of life. As Viktor Frankl pointed out years ago, we cannot exist as human beings without meaning in our lives. Yet, is meaning and our search for it, the same as this fire?

Most of us live with something we feel passionate about, if only our spouse or children (not to suggest these are small things). Some of us are fortunatre to work in fields we feel passionate about. In such cases work is not work, but life itself. Others feel passionate about the world and its condition. We live to repair it, to bring it to life, to heal it, to make the world a better place.

In whatever context this passion arises, it must be balanced. Tempering our passions is like temporing steel. We fold the steel over and over, pounding it, folding it, pounding it, folding it, until the moment it becomes a fine blade. With each folding the steel must rest. There is a time for heat, a time for pounding, a time for folding, and a time for rest. So too with what we love.

It would be a good practice for each of us to address the questions at the top of this post then ask ourselves how we balance and integrate these into our lives.

Be well.