A Poem On Real-Life Passion
I recently met a young woman named Miranda who published a book on art and the reality of failing, Don't Make Art, Just Make Something.
The main concept of the book is that for those of us who are just starting out, it's next to impossible to hit it out of the park on the first swing. The vast majority of the time, there will be many 'failures' and the key to learning and getting better is through these failures. This applies just as well to fledgling artists as it does to anyone progressing in a traditional career.
In this book, Miranda has a poem on passion that I thought was very fitting for the message here at Crazy Enough To Try. In fact, her book actually inspired the post on practicing your passions. With her permission, I've included the poem below.
III.
Finding passion is a lot like falling in love
and I don’t mean that in a good way.
I mean that in a gut-wrenching, heart-aching, throat-clenching, spirit-breaking way.
We’ve all been told how it should happen,
how it should feel,
they say we’ll be swept off our feet,
dumped in a fairytale,
and then we’ll be happy.
The thing is,
passion isn’t something you follow.
It follows you.
Dogging your every step
from now until oblivion,
driving you forward day after day
to do what you love even when you hate it.
And there will be days when you hate it.
Because passion isn’t happiness,
it’s drive.
It’s a drive that runs so deep you can never turn it off,
that can be so miserable you wish you could tear it out of you but you can’t,
because it is you.
Because passion isn’t only falling in love,
it’s daily toil of being in love.
It’s the afternoon arguments,
the evenings of silence,
the late night tears.
It’s the creeping doubt,
the endless effort,
the constant demand.
It’s the moment you look at your lover standing there beside the teapot you were arguing about two days ago
and you think,
“Oh, this is what everyone was talking about.”
And for that day love comes freely
and passion is easy.
But those days,
the ones when clouds fly down from the sky
just so that you can walk on them
do not come often.
So cherish them.
Remember them when you have to show up the next day
even though the clouds are gone.
Because passion is worth working for.
It is a fire that runs through your veins,
not caring whether it’s warming you or eating you alive,
but filling you either way.
It is a lifetime of dedication
with sparks of inspiration that are almost like the fairytales,
but better.
--
I encourage readers to pick up the book from Amazon.com, it's a quick read, but it made me think. As Miranda puts it, this isn't a book of distilled knowledge from a guru who studied the world for 30 years. It's a book from the perspective of a young person looking around her at the differences between what she expected out of life and what actually transpired, all the while trying to make sense of it all. Not that much different than the series of events that led to the writing of Crazy Enough To Try.
- Ryan