I Have No Passions

I originally wrote this blog some time ago but never got round to publishing it. The reason I’m resurrecting it now is because it’s no longer true. I now have a passion. I plan to write a blog entitled, I Now Have a Passion, and I feel it makes sense to publish this blog to provide some level of context…  

My daughter came back from a school skiing/snowboarding trip full of the wonders of snowboarding. She was originally supposed to be in the skiing group but because of a mix up, or some issue with numbers she was put in the snowboarding group. Turns out she was sooo happy to have been put in snowboarding. She identified as a snowboarder. She didn’t see herself as one of the skiers and didn’t want to. ‘I think you’d be a snowboarder Dad.’ I took that as a complement. Snowboarding looks cool. I think I’d be a snowboarder too.

She told me how she couldn’t wait to get up the mountain in the morning. How she couldn’t wait to get through lunchtime in order to get back to snowboarding. Now let me tell you, this is a girl who enjoys her food and likes her lunchtime social catchup. She really must have loved snowboarding. It’s like floating or flying she said… until you crash.

There are few things more beautiful than witnessing a passion in someone else, especially someone you love.

I’ve never had a passion. Never. I’ve had likes but not passions. Most of the activities I’ve enjoyed, that have threatened to become passions, I’ve done for a reason. I’ve done them to make me seem more interesting or because I thought they would make me appear more cool. I’ve done them because quite frankly I felt I had to do something. Turning up to work each Monday morning having no interesting response to the question, ‘what did you get up to at the weekend’, can get a bit embarrassing after a while. I think my colleagues thought I was being mysterious, but I simply hadn’t done anything of note.

In my late teens I enjoyed golf – until sciatica put an end to that. And thinking back, the golf was the closest I have come to having a passion. In my twenties and thirties I practised various martial arts. But other than that there’s not much that comes to mind. I was into the piano at one point. I dreamed of being a jazz musician. I considered the likes of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane to be just about as cool as it gets. I’ve enjoyed trying to learn foreign languages and attempting to write novels, but in truth these activities fell short of passions. They were a means to an external ends that diluted the passion.

The weird truth is, is that we don’t need to have passions these days. The counter to that truth is that these days we need to have passions more than ever. Nowadays we can get endless pleasure hits whilst sitting on our sofa, but that is a path that leads to a weird state of contented depression.

We must go on a family snowboarding trip my daughter said. She was life aware enough to at least provide the footnote that it would be expensive. But it will be soooo worth it. Maybe snowboarding can become my passion.