Passion

I’ve been thinking about passion, and intensity this weekend. Seems a little appropriate for the MLK Day holiday. I think MLK Jr. was all about passion.

I’ve been told I’m intense. I look at that word, and it feels negative to me. A light that’s intense is harsh, glaring, and hurts the eyes. You say intense pain, never intense joy. Intense feels piercing, invasive, uncomfortable, unpleasant. I don’t like to think of myself as intense.

I prefer passionate. Leaving the sexual connotations alone for a while, passionate is positive. It’s alive. It evokes energy and meaning and feeling, a pulse within itself that drives one to action. You can’t be passionately sedentary. Passion makes you move. Passion makes you act.

I remember reading books, a decade ago, with analogies of people as light. I can’t remember the specific books, but the analogies have stayed with me. People can be light, and draw other people to them with the heat and light of their energy, enthusiasm and passion. Others draw from the light, and give back to the light in a symbiotic relationship. Thus you find creative people in a community drawn to each other, hanging socially, exchanging ideas and creating new ones. That’s what sometimes happens, anyway. But, sometimes, some people draw from the light and draw from it, and drain it away, without returning to it. Some people can thus be drained of their light, their energy, their passion.

Of course, no passion is endless. Everyone needs their battery’s "recharged" at some point or another, if they’re being too intense, too passionate. And conversely, those around you, those who love you, can’t exist long in too intense of a light, Something has to change, sometimes. You have to rest for a time, but if the passion is there, and the passion is real, you’re ready to go again, and pretty soon. There is an ebb and a flow to it. But it’s the flow that drives.

Lately, my passion has been flowing. Flowing so much it’s been a bit exhausting. Flowing so hard it’s been scaring some of those around me. I’ve been feeling the drain, and haven’t identified anything specifically that’s recharging me, other than the kind words of friends, and love. Or maybe more specifically I should say, I’ve been recharging—overcharging—on that.

So maybe I should accept the intense label. If I’m passionate about the things I care about, about the things I believe, about the things I want, and that passion translates as intensity, maybe I should bow to that. Maybe intensity is what makes transforms creativity from a tool into an inescapable direction, a way of life, and maybe intensity and real passion are inseparable. Or maybe I’m just on the road to burning out.

Either way, this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.