I think the ideas and concepts around passion and purpose confuse a lot of us.
They’re a couple of wonderful concepts – to live well, to have meaning and make the most of this short time on Earth – and yet it’s so easy to look at our lives and think we’re not doing enough.
Combined with social media and all the “rah-rah” action there: the whole “Carpe Diem – Seize the Day” inspirational stuff, it can create havoc and struggle where there doesn’t need to be any.
Your life can be sweet, wonderful, full of ease … and yet your ideas about what a passionate and purposeful life should look like can create a shadow, it can be super easy to look for more or think you’re doing something wrong.
The trouble is you start to compare your life to some ideal or some other person – and it’s the end of contentment and fullness.
What you have gets lost in “What's next?” or “It’s not enough!”. Enough gets forgotten in the search for more.
Sure there might be more, but make your foundation contentment. If you like it, you like it. If it’s working for you, wonderful.
And yet, the key to life is still having a reason to wake up in the morning for.
Any reason will do! Big or small, just some kind of why – which you, and only you, can choose.
But the more you know that why, the more easy and straight forward life becomes. The more alive you are too. The more you focus on the why, the less apathy can come in, the simpler it is to survive tough times. Victor Frankl talked about the importance having a reason to live in his experience of surviving the Nazi concentration camps.
I love this quote he uses because it's so true:
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Find a why. It will change, let it change – but also be content now above all things. You are enough now, exactly as you are, exactly with what you love.
Maybe somedays you'll feel passionate, maybe not, but you can always choose to be interested.
The problem with passion and purpose