Recently I worked with a young man in his third year at University. He had already changed his major three times, changed colleges twice, and still wasn’t finding his place, wasn’t finding his happiness. Why? Because he didn’t feel he deserved to have his passion.
Many people come to me with the question “What should I be doing with my life?” So many, in fact, that I have created a class this fall to help people answer this question for themselves. Often, at the base of this question is another question: “Do I deserve to be me?” Do I deserve to have my passions? Do I deserve to do the things that make me happy? Do I deserve to live my own life, and not the life charted for me by someone else?
The young man I worked with expressed to me that he needed to “hurry up” and find something to do to make money so he wouldn’t be a “burden to his father” anymore. That burden, he supposed, was being “dependent” – dependent on help, advice, aid, finances, etc. He needed to “get serious” and do something that “makes sense”. He told me all the things his father might want him to do, the list of “things that make sense”. But then he suddenly broke out and said “But I don’t want to do what Dad says – he’s miserable! He’s not even doing what he really wants to do!” So why is Dad doing the job he does? “To make money.”
How many passions lie locked away in dusty, cobwebbed closets? The world is haunted with them.
We come into this world with our very own unique set of passions and talents (because we are always given the means to DO that which we are moved to do – passions and talents always go together). They are in our “backpack”, so to speak, for our journey on this planet we call “our life”. If we throw that backpack into a closet and lock it away it has no choice but to haunt us until we break the chains and pull it back out. It’s a part of us. Inextricable. Our passions and our talents are who we ARE.
Want to know the Jewish definition of a demon? Demons were the last thing G-D was in the process of making – after Adam/Eve – but had to stop because suddenly the sun was setting and it was time for Shabbat (we stop working on Shabbat). So the demon is a creation that isn’t finished. Not finished, it haunts us.
Not finished, our passions and talents will haunt us. We have to take them out of the closet and engage.
I could have named the new class : “Can I come out of the closet?” Because, every single one of us has something close in our heart that we are afraid to say. “I would love to be a musician” “In my parallel life I would be a florist” “Someday maybe I’ll take a trip to Italy to learn to cook”. It’s time to come out of the closet – to pull the passions out of the closet and breathe life into them so that they no longer haunt you.
Sometimes we bury our passions so far down we don’t remember what they are. “I don’t know what I want to do ‘when I grow up’” is another thing I hear a lot. Go back – go back to childhood and remember the moments that made you feel there was magic in the world. Often, that is where we last left off. And we left off there, often, because right after that someone told us to stop dreaming and grow up.
It’s time to dream again.
Imagine the world where all the dusty passions got dusted off and re-discovered. Would it be a more positive world? I think so. It would certainly be less scary.
Happy Dreaming,
Bonnie
