Ladies and Gentleman. Welcome to the new year! The year to BE YOU! To DREAM BIG! To achieve anything and everything you ever wanted!
Still with me? You might have been hearing this a lot. You might have been hearing it from me. Let me just start by saying “I am sorry.” So so sorry. For making you believe that you must know your passion and life purpose and doing absolutely everything possible to make it a reality.
The truth is, I am writing you from the other side of awareness. I spent all of 2018 discovering and unearthing my passions. Learning about who I really am. What I am really meant to do in this world. And diving head on to tackling it. The amount of pressure that I put on myself to define clear targets and objectives for every single thing I love to do, to set timelines, to make it profitable, well, it near-well burned me out.
I spent every waking moment of every day stressed out that I wasn’t living my dream and I wasn’t living my truth and that by definition I was somehow failing. Failing to succeed, failing to be true to myself, and failing to make my passion profitable. I am still working through this. I don’t have all the answers. I am figuring it out one day at a time. But what I am learning right here and right now is that not everything is black and white. Sometimes there is a beautiful gray. I look up at the skies here in Berlin and I see a different shade of gray every day. What a beautiful metaphor to have shining in my face day-in and day-out as I search for the sparkling white light of summer - or I crave the deep dark black of night. There simply is no black or white. It is all a gray zone.
And so as you find the things you love and discover new passions, keep them close to your heart. Explore them. Play with them. Enjoy them. Do not feel the need to live them every moment of every day. If you are lucky enough to love what you do, you will become passionate about your work. If you spend your days with people you care about and who inspire you, you will become passionate about their company. Do not set yourself up on the golden path to singular passion only to feel disappointment or dejected when the end goal feels too high to reach. Feel grateful to know what sparks a flame in your heart, and grateful to have a beautiful gray zone where you get to explore what it all means for you and what you want to do with it.
This article may be for the Type A’s who relentlessly pursue the end goal, but I hope there is a spark of resonance for the greater good. Take your time to enjoy what you love and to let it show you where it yearns to be in your life. It might be in work. It might be in fitness. It might be in your holidays. Or it might just be the hour of peace and calm right before bed. Don’t force it. Just sit back, and let it unfold.