I was reading a blog post by Steven Cardinale today on the subject of passion today and I started writing a comment that just got too long to be a comment anymore, so I decided to post it here instead. In his blog post, he posits that Passion is anger and love combined. I disagree. I’m an incredibly passionate person and it doesn’t feel angry to me.
There’s an old sales saying that you can’t be a good salesperson unless you have the “fire in the belly” to motivate you to get out there and sell. To me, passion is like that – but it’s a fire in the heart. It’s a motivating force that drives you forward because you’re in love with the idea of what could be. It has the intensity of anger, but it isn’t the same thing as anger.
Passion lives in the heart, whereas anger lives in the belly (with the sales motivation not the same thing there either, but the belly holds the energy of the will and therefore both of those items live there). The heart holds the energy of love and connection.
Passion is another form of love – it’s the masculine side of love. The feminine side is the feeling of loving another person and receiving love in return. It’s a soft, receptive, open sort of energy. Passion is the energy of being so in love with something that you grab it and drag it back by the hair. You simply MUST have it and are willing to brave whatever it takes in order to get it. That’s the masculine side of the same energy as love. Passion untempered by feminine love becomes obsession (and stalking in the case of interpersonal passion).
If you haven’t clicked over to Steven’s blog yet, you should. He’s got great stuff there. I know I’ll be using it to inspire my writings in the future too.
