Passion...

The one thing we all believe we have… the one thing we all crave….

It drives us to bring out our best and worst. It causes us to achieve what we ourselves would never have dared to expect from our tiny, insignificant entities, and it makes us do things we never believed we would.

Passion... the single factor responsible for both, our greatest triumphs, as well as our worst failings.

All of us at some point, have been consumed by its scorching yet exhilarating flames. Be it in the wild joys of love or the dark fathoms of blackest hate, we all are acquainted to the indomitable, raw sense of desire or despair that true, untamed passion is capable of filling us with.

We are all thankful for the fits that it induced in us, enabling us to push us over the brink and help us achieve the objective we so desperately craved…. Simultaneously we regret some of the actions that that these fits have made us perform… things as unlike ourselves as to have been committed by some other being, our alter egos….

If passion were a drug, we would all perhaps be addicted to it. Just for the sheer, intense physical, mental and emotional release it provides us with. We would cherish the moments of clarity it would provide us with. A few precious seconds when our path is clear in front of us. Unclouded by the shadows of society, unburdened by the weight of reason… nothing left to guide us but our hearts….

I have encountered passion myself… many times. Usually in frustration and pain… but yet… never have I regretted it for a second….

True it exhausted me at a bone deep level… true it made me want to scream till my throat were to bleed… true it made me curse the agony that had reduced me to a state more approaching an insane canine than a rational human being… yet when it passed I never rued the minutes I spent curled into a ball… blind and unresponsive to the world….

Upon resurfacing I was drained, but calmer… I could always focus on the apparently unimportant trivialities of my daily banal existence pushing aside the things of monstrous significance and impact on me… I could push them aside since my fit of passion had rendered them satisfied… for a while at any rate….

Having often heard that people may be ‘passionate’ about their jobs, or in their lives… I wonder. I have witnessed, first hand, the power that passion holds… I try to fathom how superbly, amazingly it can manifest itself if channeled thus… productively… for the good.

I have also heard that it is possible to love ‘passionately’… and again I wonder. How painfully all consuming could that become? The strength of feeling that I have experienced coursing through me… were it to be directed at a single individual would be… blinding, maddening. I cannot help but feel a bit jealous of all the people who claim to have experienced it….

The nectar of the ones in love… the agony of the ones without… the gift of the lucky ones that spend their lives doing what they love… an undeniable source of tremendous, uncontrollable power to all.

Passion…