Filling your time with passion

OK. You know you want to live with passion. But what you have is a 8+ hour a day job, the chores of cooking, paying the bills and visiting your wife’s boring relatives. Where is the time left for living fully?

First of all, you must establish what is really important to you in life. It is incredibly easy to take more and more responsibilities and “things to do”. But there are some natural limits. Fortunately, also some cures.

1) Often, if we think of things as “chores”, we dawdle. We delay. We read the newspaper. We do anything to push the view of the unpleasant task to behind our mental horizon. This is called resistance, and it is very natural. However, we often waste more time procrastinating than the job itself would cost. Train yourself to stop procastrinating, and your productivity will jump. See also Mark Forster’s book “How to get everything done – and still have time to play.”

2) Every activity can be unlimited in perfection. Do you want to have a shiningly clean house every day of the week, or are you content with doing the dishes daily and vacuum cleaning weekly? Of course one can say that everything is important, but you can always look to which level of activity is sufficient. Then schedule the time for that. Perhaps it even helps in that time to try to work as fast as possible, do a match with your previous personal record. This makes the activity more fun, challenging and productive.

3) Set a limit to the number of things you want to do. Don’t disperse yourself too much. If you have a major hobby but cannot spend at least half an hour-45 minutes a day doing it (except in emergencies) you are cluttering yourself too much. Arnold Bennett in “How to live on 24 hours a day” even recommends having 3-4x1.5 hour a week for concentrating on an interest.

A second problem for many people is: but I do have some time, there is just nothing interesting to do in that.

To these people (to which I often belong myself too) I must say that knowing what interests you demands that you spend time in finding it out. It almost never “pops out of thin air” while you are moaning in your chair about the undefeatable boredom of life. There are plenty of self-help books which recommend courses of action to find your passion, whether that is in a job or in the rest of your life. And often passions flow from one field of interest to another. Better to get started on a 7 than waiting till a 9 drops on your head. And be aggressive about trying new things.

The only criterion that I would give for a good passion would be that it involves more than being a spectator. The more creative you can be, the more you can learn, the better it is. So even if you have a passion for soap series, it would be much better not to spend all your spare time in watching soaps. Make a soap-related website, write a book on the structure of soaps, think of your own soap-series, whatever. As soon as one is not only a consumer, but also a kind of producer, your expertise and passion will soar.

Tomorrow I’d like to tie up some loose ends, and perhaps find new ones…