Passion: If Not Now, When?

My second act and engaging the writer within

I quit my primary work in 2024, and if retirement means anything at all for me, it means the opportunity to pursue and live my passion. It means a second act. For me, that act has been obvious all my life—to live the rapture of being alive through my writing; that is, to follow my curiosity and engage the creative imagination through writing. I have always wanted to do this, but felt constrained by financial limitations. I loved engaging my family, friends, community, and outdoor sports, especially sailing. I loved dancing and playing in the snow, and I loved gardening. I still do. But loving something isn’t exactly the same as passion. In fact, loving something can distract you from passion quite easily—I’d say it almost always does.

What Is Passion?

Any writing on passion needs to begin with the realization that the root word for passion in Latin is patior, which gives passio as the synonym, and passion as our current word. Patior means to suffer, as in the passion play of Jesus Christ. So while we today usually use the term as a synonym for intense feeling or even as one flavor of love, any use of the term carries this older meaning. Passion is suffering. And passion is intense feeling. To engage one’s passion is to suffer intense feeling—its possessions, limitations, joys, and agony. Passion happens in love, in work, in competition, and in death.

At a younger stage of life, I thought about passion as a way to express my commitment to something. “Passion” in this usage is usually a replacement for energy or intensity. It is an ego-based assertion of intense energy trying to be inflated into the most important thing in the world. I remember, for instance, a lunch meeting with a guy who was looking for a job as a sales trainer. I owned a sales training company at the time. We were talking and his energy was getting ramped up as he felt like he was applying for a job. At one point he looked at me and said, “Tony, I am passionate about sales training.” At which point I thought to myself: You poor bastard! Why? Because if sales training is the most important thing in your life—i.e., your passion—I personally think you ought to be looking for a psychotherapist. Something is wrong at the deepest level of your soul. A passion for beauty, truth, or justice I can understand. A passion for nature or a passion for God or a passion for healing or serving people in need—I get it. But a passion for sales training? Hmmm. But then I wonder: Was I too harsh on him? Too judgmental? Maybe. But as another friend told me: “Tony, you have the most powerful bullshit detector I have ever seen.” This smelled like bullshit.

Suffering Passion

To engage one’s passion is to knowingly and consciously accept the suffering of that passion—because it is a true passion, not an inflated assertion of ego. At this point in my life, for example, passion is taking a new turn. I am a writer, author, poet. I would like to play music, go sailing, travel the world, learn to cook in a culinary school in Italy, and many other fine joys of the ego. But those are joys, not passions. My passion is to write, and for that, I suffer the loss of some of these joys. My passion requires expertise, and expertise requires time. Ten thousand hours, Malcom Gladwell said. Ten. Thousand. Hours. That’s five years of full time devotion. Five years of suffering the limits needed to put in that time, even if the work itself is a joy. Other things are denied. They must be.

This talk, however, suggests that passion is a choice. I’m not so sure. Passion, I think, is a power of the soul. It erupts from within rather than being claimed from without. Its center is the soul. It makes the heart suffer. It makes the ego do without its joys. It is not a creature of the mind. Passion seizes us; we do not claim it. And the true measure of the passion is whether or not it makes you suffer as you live it.

Passion requires engagement, and that’s why it is limiting and brings suffering. It is one path, not every path. It doesn’t always feel like freedom; sometimes, it is more like a prison. It feels this way because there is something inside me that must come out. It is incessant. It refuses to back down. It forces its way into consciousness and activity. I could repress passion, which would be very sane—take care of things, feed the kids, tend my relationship. Or, I might miss it by running toward those joys—traveling the world, adventuring, becoming an ex-patriot, or going fishing and golfing. These activities are particularly appealing to many retirees. To me, they are a way to avoid my passion.

Feeding and Cultivating Passion

Although my primary experience of passion is to be seized by it, I also realize that I must feed my passion to engage it. Assuming that their art is their passion, musicians and performing artists feed their passion by practice and rehearsal. As a poet and writer, I feed my passion by reading, journaling, and questioning. I stimulate the poetic imagination by memorizing poems or copying them by hand. In my experience of accepting my passion, I take on the responsibility and joy of feeding it. If I do not stimulate the imagination, I begin to feel sick. If I do not read and argue with the books, I find myself getting irritated with people and obligations. This irritation is the energy of an unfed passion. It is also the energy that turns good people into old curmudgeons. I need to feed in myself what must be fed.

To accept the suffering and opportunity of passion also means cultivating it. Gardeners often acknowledge that they cannot make a thing grow; they can only remove the things that get in the way. Cultivating passion is similar. One must cultivate a passion by creating space for it to flourish. For me, this means re-orienting life to the passion. I eliminate whatever resists the growth of my passion. I downsized my home significantly to reduce financial strain and enable a practice of passion that does not need to generate as much money. This cultivates focus on the project itself. I hunted and found the perfect writing table for me. My life schedule orients around my passion. These are ways of cultivating a passion. They are sometimes part of the suffering, too.

Passion and Mortality

After my wife died at fifty-six, I am far more cognizant of my mortality than ever before. Many other friends have died since. “Forever” keeps getting shorter and shorter. Now, at sixty-two years old, who knows? I’m called to write, so if not now, when? Old age is coming. My brain could get sick. Certainly, death will come. Am I really willing to leave my passion unengaged?

My passion has become my calling, so I will suffer it whether I do it or not. To engage it means that I suffer this limitation of my passion and its work. To refuse means I suffer the soul’s disconnection from who I really am. Since this is my passion, I suffer either way. But I think there are gifts in choosing to engage passion.

What is the beauty of living my passion? When I engage and suffer my passion, I get something better than meaning—I get what Joseph Campbell said we all want, “to experience the feeling of the rapture of being alive.” Passion brings me to that rapture. It is to fully experience this “one wild and precious life” as Mary Oliver described it. I fully enliven my mind, my body, and my soul when I am seized by the passion that is within me. Passion drops me into the depth of my human experience. It makes my life real and I feel like it is counting for something. It draws me into an experience with the divinity within—that is, to an experience of God. I touch that divinity when I write. I touch it when I read poems out loud. Not every time, of course, but often enough that it tells me, without doubt, that I am alive! I am where I am supposed to be.

Here's the thing—I have a choice. At retirement, I could escape. I could vacate. I could go fishing or golfing. But what would I really be escaping? My answer is: life itself. I would find myself in my last days living the one outcome I dread more than any other: Sitting at the bar drinking with the writers who never write.

No thanks, I’ll suffer my passion.

Anthony Signorelli