Following Your Passion

I'm really enjoying watching my older daughter follow her passions.  If you don't do the things that matter the most to you, what's life all about?  It's funny, but I often tell my daughter how much I learn from her.  Maybe that's the way it should be.  We learn from our children.  I suppose that if we raise them the right way, it will actually lead in that direction.

I'd like to feel that I've followed my passions for most of my life.  I hope that if there's one thing that has defined me, that would be it.  As I look toward the future, I need to remind myself of this fact.  I made a comment to my wife the other day that when it came to the textbook that I'm editing, I don't consider that task to be work.  In fact, I don't want to work anymore, nor should I.  I don't need to work, which is fortunate to begin with.  However, I want to do the things that have meaning to me.  If I actually do that, I won't ever work again.

There is the real focus.  If I'm doing the things that I'm passionate about, that I care about, I'll never work another day in my life.  That's a great sentiment, and I probably need to break some old habits in order to follow that path. For starters, I need to look at the tasks at hand through a lens that allows me to determine if I'm doing a task not whether I want to or need to, but because I'm passionate about doing it.

I watched my daughter provide the tech support for an improv show.  I could see in her eyes how engaged she was and how much joy she had in figuring out what to do.  After all, it's really art.  Its creativity.  That's what we all strive for in life, whether or not we're actually artists, or whether or not we're actually creative.  She's able to do it from behind a computer or on the stage, where her skills doing improv are continually growing.  She's always done it with her writing, which is the one place that she's always been able to demonstrate both her creativity and talent.  I actually realized why she has never wanted to look at writing as work, the same way that I don't want to look at projects that I'm doing as work.  I want to feel my passion, and I want to follow my passion.  Just like my daughter.