A conversation with my grandson sparked an interesting discussion on passion, and how that can help make a decision about someone’s future. I feel that passion can even influence how we deal with day-to-day life.
Consider this quote from the internet:
Knowing your passion in life gives you something to build the rest of your life around. Your passion can be anything that simultaneously challenges you, intrigues you and motivates you. Contrary to the idea that doing what you love makes work effortless, a passion puts you to work.
We all know that kind of person that walks through life, lamenting all that has befallen them (every time you interact with them), or explaining how external factors have ruined their lives (so, not their fault). Why do these people make the conscious decision to be negative; to wallow in misery; to never own their miserable state? I can’t imagine that people actually enjoy feeling miserable, so why do they stay stuck in this negative environment, constantly voicing their negative feelings so vehemently. Do these kinds of people lack passion?
This is no doubt a question that many people have tried to answer. I have thought about this a lot over the years, as I have watched people handle various things that come across their paths; how do they handle situations; what do they take away with them; how they respond to negative circumstances. It seems to come down to how someone is wired, what tools they have to cope with different circumstances and scenarios.
This reminds me of something I always loved to share with my students over the years: The human heart has a finite number of times that it will beat in our lifetime. According to the internet, if you live to be 80 years old, your heart would have beaten approximately 3,363,840,000 times! That’s a lot of heartbeats, and I believe we can decide how we want to spend those heartbeats.
Consider this; you are driving on a highway and someone cuts you off. Right at that moment your heart starts to beat faster because you had to react to someone driving into your space. However, the next several heartbeats are under your control; you can decide to start raging at the person that cut you off, or you can make the decision to let it go. What good are heartbeats wasted on a complete stranger, when you could save those precious heartbeats for the important people in your life. Remember, you have control of that decision, so you regulate where your heartbeats are being used, you don’t have an endless supply.
This has helped me so many times in my life, and maybe this small premise plays a part in our passion for life. If you acknowledge that the heart has a finite number of beats, can you not decide to make a more conscious effort of deciding where you want to use those heartbeats? I would think that it takes more heartbeats to remember everything that you are miserable about, and to constantly voicing that misery, then it does to remember all the things you are thankful for, and sharing a smile with everyone you meet. This makes passion a controllable emotion; you can decide when you what to feel passionate about, or when you want to simply let something go and move on.
At 14 years old, I am not sure that my grandson has all of the tools he needs to help him find his passion in life. I am sure that some people become passionate about something at a very young age; some, not until later in life, but either way, passion has to play a big part in our lives.
So then I wonder, can someone be passionate about being miserable? Surely not; who would want to go through their life feeling that way. But for those people that we have come across, that seem to find the negative side of everything in their life, why can’t we help them turn that around. The way we can do that, in my opinion, is through example.
Have you ever noticed that if someone smiles at you for no reason, it is pretty hard not to smile back (unless you are a real grinch and think that they are smiling for a negative reason). A smile, something so simple, and so easy to execute; the bare minimum amount of muscles needed to smile at 10. These people I am talking about, that always seem negative, or miserable about life; what would happen to them if they simply said nothing, and just smiled as they meet people in their day; less heartbeats needed for sure, and couldn’t this help in some small way to make them feel better? When you smile at another person, it is rare for them not to smile back, so then you count that as a positive response to your minimal muscle movement. That seems like a win-win to me. (-:
Let’s talk about betrayal, we have probably ALL experienced some level of betrayal in our lives. People with a terminal illness, or an incurable disease might feel that their bodies have betrayed them in some way, people that have had what they thought were friends, turn on them, that is a sense of betrayal. How do we move on from something like this, without becoming one of those miserable people that blame the world for their miserable state of mind.
We do it by using conscious thought in a positive direction. Peoples’ actions and words can only hurt us if we allow them to hurt us; we have the choice to walk away, not spend any more heartbeats on those people, or that situation. That is in OUR control. We can acknowledge what we conceive as betrayal, or pain, or injustice, but we don’t have to stay in that mindset. We alone have the ability to move past those things in our lives that we want gone, no one else can really help us through these strong feelings.
But 10 small muscles used to smile, a determination to not waste any more heartbeats on something, those are conscious decisions that we can make, and through those decisions, our passion for enjoyment, happiness, acceptance, friendship, love, all of those wonderful things that we all look for, can be obtained.
At the end of all of my 8-month classes, on the final exam, I always wrote this for the last question:
What is the one thing that you learned during this program that you will never forget?
There was no right or wrong answer to this question, and I gave a mark to everyone regardless of what they wrote, but some of the most rewarding answers I ever received was simply these:
I learned that I have a finite number of heartbeats, and that I am the one that decides where to spend those heartbeats.
Watch my heartbeats!
Decide who gets my heartbeats.
I know that every time I read those kinds of answers to my question, I teared up a bit. But I also realized that I was witnessing someone that would move through their life with a conscious decision to allow their passion for life to rule their path forward, and to always remember that we have a choice in life, and that choice can bring a smile not only to our faces, but with minimal effort, to everyone around us.