Socien's Blog

Passion is the work of mere calmness and the zero-harm zeal which, if it coexist with patience, does not only persist through obstacles but is happy to welcome obstacled. (Most mistaken this zero-harm zeal with anger). If true passion is to find its way into what you do, allow time to pass; more time with zero achievements before you can get into harvest time.

Related: Believing in yourself and your vision is willingness.

But this does not make passion the same as patience. While passion persists through obstacles, it does so through obstacles of its own choice. If your passion is music. You will face obvious obstacles like your parents’ home incriminating any musical instrument, your laziness and lack of practice and all those things you must get rid of. As you dig deep financial issues start to beg you to forget music for years and improve on how you handle your finances and find a job. The latter obstacle is non-obvious. Passion deals with the non-obvious obstacles by avoiding them; joining an already existing band instead of waiting for the right time before you can own yours or giving up the monetisation of your musical aspirations.

Purpose on the other hand stays firm on the original intent and dream. It brings in a rare willingness to do whatever to reach that dream. There is no favourite obstacle to tackle for one who has a purpose. While passion can make you happy in the moment, purpose takes you to pain and more suffering. Passion is, sometimes, the death of alternative paths that should lead you to an even better destination.

Anger, on the other hand, unsettles the calmness, and disrupts the upbuilding of passion. Hence through anger, you miss out on having to do it passionately no matter how much you think you like doing it. This anger comes in handy along with its cousins like frustration. It can’t give you an inner working environment that gets you to find or build your passion.

Since building a passion is the most sober of the decisions one can make, passion itself means decisions are made in the presence of inner calmness. Such decisions are then executed with the softness of the water, going around obstacles but, in so doing, moulding landforms as time passes. It is safer to say that it takes patience to find your passion.

Building a passion is a matter of being the one who is happy to do this, who got this. It is a matter of feeling honoured to be the one. Even when they emerge to be poor ones, decisions made do not easily become one to cause regrets. Decisions are made along the confines of what you love. This limits your progress because it is not all of the decisions along the confines of what you love that can fully exploit your potential.

The process of finding your passion should be itself the source as well as the product of inner calmness. That inner calmness does not have to wait for floods to stage its wonders. Even when facing scarcity, passion builds alternatives from the few capabilities and resources you have, and puts them into use instead. I believe that scarcity and deprivation improve the imagination and creativity of one who patiently faces it with a strong heart.

I had to slowly learn that passion builds you as much as you build it. A passion is what you end up being, after those slight diversions from what you thought you could be along the way. In 2015, when 19 years old, I had hopes of becoming a game developer. I started laser-focused on mastering Web-Programming languages. In 2016, my focus shifted to blogging which I sensed would require less capital. What followed were seven years of failure and seven years of not giving up.

You start, perhaps, being stupid. But as passion builds, you develop the guts to be stupid more than enough, to find sense in what is senseless to them. This stupidity gets you to not be offended by them finding out and expressing their thoughts about your stupidity.

While you do your thing, being stupid, passion remains a profound senseless reminder living within you. It reminds you that you have to smile. That you are the very reason for that smile. You should keep that reason ready and never take it away from you. Just by smiling you are starting a conversation with the inner self. A conversation that is restless until some inner calmness is achieved. A smile reinforces the passion to handle the complexity of building you. You see, you are not that easy to handle.

The very reason why you should not miss a chance to travel your path passionately is the fact that passion or the process of finding it is blind. Passion is blind to what’s unpleasing. In the mixed bag “unpleasing” what’s difficult takes a great chunk of space. Personal transformation makes one let go of what’s easy in favour of what’s difficult. Therefore, it is safer to say finding passion is a process of transformation.

When building a passion you don’t have to build it on what makes sense to them (or you at first) and you don’t have to do it overnight. You go through a process of transformation, a process which decides for you where to germinate and grow your liking buds. The process of finding a passion equates to the behaviour of a pebble thrown to the water’s surface where it ricochets, traversing forward. The pebble is less likely to stay in the straight line with each bounce slightly diverting it leftward or rightward. Some pebbles fail to ricochet. They sink immediately. The point is you do not fully decide on what to call your passion beforehand. You start. Slight diversions happen along the way until you find your niche.

Let time pass. Be cool with it passing. Smile. While walking your path that way you shall stumble upon your passion. Getting to find your passion is a complex quest. Rushing over, blaming, anger, and the feeling of betrayal make it certain that you do not get to settle into what the quest demands from you before you can break through.

Passion, an undefeated thirst to conquer.

I wish to call an undefeated desire to conquer. But I do not see so much desire but un-defeatism in it. It is not for me to say that with passion one is undefeated but he has the guts to stay with it no matter how defeated he is. No matter how much the distance between him and the goal and how much the said distance is increasing with each failure counting. Passion seeks to make a difference and that difference is made without one who is passionate noticing it. Passion does the unseen. It brings commitment into existence. Its downside, however, is that it selects obstacles to tackle. You therefore need purpose as much as you need a passion.

There are things in life that take passion to build them. These are the things that need a heart that says no to obstacles, senselessly no. Passion travels through an effort tunnel, bypasses the need for results and builds inner strength instead of an outward one. This to me is the undefeated nature of passion.

We each tend to conclude earlier that an ongoing undertaking has failed. When there is evidence that failure is imminent, concluding that failure is now and forever is easy. We quit easily. It is easier now because systems that are educating us and informing us distance us from patience. Think of items that go viral online but how our education system values results instead of effort. A mindset built around results takes risks and performs well in a world of competition because beating the competition is the ultimate goal. But that very mindset may not be as ready to endure as the one that is effort-centred.

Most things are impossible not because they are. They are impossible because they are difficult. If you are to check in your dictionary, difficult is not how impossible is defined. With passion, you have your chance to feel the pain of navigating difficult seas, fail, and keep going until you have possibilities out of difficulties and make a difference.