I have been read­ing Sir Ken­neth Robinson’s book The Ele­ment over the last cou­ple of weeks. It is a great book about find­ing, and hon­or­ing, your true pas­sion. Inter­est­ingly, I have seen the Aris­to­tle quote above at least three times in the last week. I’m not nec­es­sar­ily one to assume fate or “things hap­pen for a rea­son,” but I must admit that after the sec­ond or third sight­ing the mean­ing of the quote started to sink in. I have yet to fig­ure my pas­sion. I cer­tainly don’t think, or want, what I cur­rently, repeat­edly, do to define me.

I work hard — repeat­edly. How­ever, I think that there’s a pretty bright line between doing some­thing out of a sense of respon­si­bil­ity and doing some­thing because of pas­sion. Don’t get me wrong, I think that doing your best on your job is def­i­nitely some­thing worth doing. It’s just not the same as work­ing, even toil­ing, on some­thing that is dri­ven by love or an inner fire. Put plainly — pas­sion. Per­haps I am writ­ing this care­fully so as not to lose my job (chor­tle); but, hon­estly, the more that I think about dis­cov­er­ing my true pas­sion, the less con­cerned I am with job secu­rity. I say this because I firmly believe that once I dis­cover or real­ize what makes me tick, the pieces will come together. I will be off and running.

I have been slowly work­ing my way through Robinson’s book because I feel like I have spent a lot of time day­dream­ing about becom­ing a full-time pho­tog­ra­pher. My inter­est has waned, rather sig­nif­i­cantly, over the past year, or so, though. I touched on this a bit in my Oper­a­tion Twenty12 piece at the begin­ning of the year. A full nine months later, if I’m being hon­est with myself, I am prob­a­bly even fur­ther away from than that day­dream than I have been since first pick­ing up a cam­era about eight years ago. The most telling sign is that I rarely pick up a cam­era any more just to shoot. I have tried to deter­mine whether I am sim­ply tak­ing an easy exit. Is becom­ing a full-time pho­tog­ra­pher just too much work, and I’m being lazy? I don’t think so.

I truly believe that we will make, or put in, the effort for some­thing we care about. I am unwill­ing to force myself to fol­low a par­tic­u­lar path sim­ply because I once thought it was “the thing.” I couldn’t care less about what oth­ers think about me chang­ing my mind. Ok…that’s not true, but I’m get­ting there. You know how it is when you pro­claim some­thing? Every­one wants to hold you to that thing, and some are oddly intractable about your dream. The glass half full view is that peo­ple see some­thing in you, or your work. They think that you’re skilled or pro­fi­cient at that par­tic­u­lar thing. Here’s the rub, though. If you’re not pas­sion­ate about what you’re doing…why bother? An Elbert Hub­bard quote came to mind.

I am pretty cer­tain that what dogs me the most is the idea that I am 46 years old and haven’t dis­cov­ered, real­ized, or acknowl­edged my true pas­sion. It seems like so many things inter­est me, yet not sin­gu­lar thing repeat­edly draws me back. This may not be true, and I may need to learn how to tune in into my heart.

One of thing that seems to be quite clear is that I am truly strug­gling to find my “thing.” I am not merely look­ing for an escape from some­thing I don’t like or work, gen­er­ally. It is as if I am hun­gry but don’t know what to eat. I know, at this point, that I don’t want filler. I want sub­stance. It is very unnerv­ing try­ing to fig­ure out just what will fill this void. It is hard to say that I am stuck in a rut, because my des­ti­na­tion is not defined. The path to dis­cov­er­ing my true pas­sion is pretty much free to explore. As the father of a high school senior, it prob­a­bly goes with­out say­ing that I have respon­si­bil­i­ties and con­cerns about my son’s next steps (col­lege) and future. How­ever, I don’t see being a good par­ent and unearthing what will sati­ate my cre­ative spirit as being mutu­ally exclu­sive. In fact, I would like to think that my son would ben­e­fit from see­ing me fol­low my heart and not accept liv­ing a life of cram­ming square pegs into round holes.

Sur­pris­ingly, I don’t really suf­fer from the more rou­tine fear of fail­ure, because you can’t fail at some­thing you never start. At this point, my biggest fear is just that — never start­ing. I have to fig­ure this out! I have reached a point, though, where I no longer want to make announce­ments or Aha! procla­ma­tions. No, I would much rather go about hon­ing in on some­thing that I just can’t do with­out, qui­etly, and make a habit of doing that thing repeat­edly — and excellently.