In the Pursuit of Passion

Passion, you are dying every day at the hands of all the normal people! My heart is sad and my mind is weeping over your painful agony. The normal people shaped you to their smallness, they stripped you of your intensity, and they painted you with the misery of their lives!

Passion! The normal people have emptied you of your essence. Worse, they have given you a new and sickly meaning. They have used your name to describe, unfeelingly, what they heard about you, without ever living you. They have conveniently plagiarized you to deceive themselves with your presence and conceal the void in their souls.

Passion! The normal people mistreated you. They confused you with foolishness, infatuation, obsession, … and few other irrelevant words. Led by their ignorance, their usual injustice befell you! They don’t know that obsession is for you what stubbornness and recklessness are for determination and courage! They don’t see that, as stupidity and waste are pathologies of kindness and generosity, obsession is a pathology of who you are!

Passion! The “teachers of life” have abused your instinctive and inspiring nature and pushed us to believe that you are a feeling we can discover if we persevere long enough with the right state of mind and the adequate determination. Their deception fills me with contempt towards their deluded lives.

Passion! The worst humiliation has befallen you in corporations, where the leaders of these organizations indoctrinate their employees with the passion they must exert in their jobs, in order to work harder and longer, and deliver better results, while every one of these greedy leaders is pursuing their obsessions for power and money, and calling it, misleadingly, by your name.

Passion! For most thinkers, you imply irrationality, possession, destruction, and loss of direction in the pursuit of your own fulfilment. They give you negative attributes to make their point and convince the normal people of your harmful hold on them. They often talk about blind passion, devouring, furious, and unleashed passion, exclusive, egoistic, and enslaving passion. Your disciples are defined as obsessed beings dominated by a single thought, you!

Passion, against what I believe in or wrote about, for you, I want to re-establish the truth! By doing so, I want to restore your inherent beauty and your inspiring power. I want to give back to you what’s to you and to the empty souls what’s to the empty souls.

Passion! You are the realization of how much two people can desire and want each other. With you, they don't think about who the other is or what their past was; it doesn't matter where they came from or to where they are going, the only thing that matters is being with each other. In you, someone can move us so much that all other people seem insignificant and dull.

Passion! You are also about suffering, because we feel unfulfilled when we have tasted you and we can't have you all the time.

Passion! You are free and wild. You are an uncontrollable feeling of intimacy. You have a sense of unreality. When we are in you, we forget the rest, then you dissolve and we go back and we start again, and again, and again! We become addicted to you, because without you, there is no vibrant life; without you, life becomes common, mediocre, and ugly.

Passion! You are the source of our will and our capacity as humans to seek joy. You trigger our longing for creation and for touching the true life. Contrary to obsession, you do not feed on extremism, vanity, egoism, or hatred; you are nourished by intelligence and ideas to find new and shared pleasures.

Passion! The “real you” doesn’t pass along like a furtive wind, but lingers like a hot and humid summer on the Mediterranean cost. You are a way of being, being everything and nothing, without boundaries, and without limitations!

Passion! Your true adepts are not idiots driven solely by their sheer desire. The passionate seek and learn new ways to feel the object of their passion. The refinement of their mind and the depth of their soul guide them to new heights of ecstasy. The passionate are delicate yet whole, overwhelmed yet lucid, and invincible yet vulnerable.

Passion! You affect the mind and the body. The passionate attract the attention, their eyes shine with life, and their body irradiates with desire. They simply become more beautiful.

Passion! Your objects are many: beauty, youth, discovery, knowledge, giving, freedom, justice, truth, etc. And your power is unlimited!

You are all encompassing. In you, live the desire, the longing, the fear, the suffering, the hope, the tears, the surprise, the joy, … you are an intense feeling, and not everyone is capable of harboring you. For those who can, I say: « enjoy every bit of your passion, every minute of it, every taste, smell, sight, sound and touch of it, there is nothing more fulfilling! »

Passion! You self-destroy the moment common sense is allowed to interfere with you. Your subject and your object initiate, unknowingly, the process of your self-destruction, when, in their strife to keep up with your demand, they lack the strength to ignore the small stuff. They succumb to their impotency to break away from their limitations, they deal with you with their common sense and they finish defeated and full of remorse. Incapable of bearing that feeling of regret about their loss (you), they call upon your enemies to rationalize their defeat and they use the stereotypical arguments of the conquered: "it was a matter of time", "we had other more important (read “within our reach”) matters to attend to", "what is the point of all this passion anyhow", "passion will not feed us", "time will heal all wounds", "and so on and so forth!"

Passion! While your slayers are repeating over and over their stupid incantations, love and conventions are jubilating!

Love (as most people know it) and conventions are your executioners. They want to tame you and to make you normal, but you don’t follow any pre-defined path or normalized course, you don’t understand the meaning of things, you know them when you live them. So, when they start explaining to you the purpose of life, they sound like an adult explaining to a little baby the taste of chocolate! The babies know the taste of chocolate when they eat it, and if they like it (most of them do) they ask for more, without knowing or even caring to know how it was prepared or what it is made of!

Passion, my ultimate quest!

I am searching for you. With you, time is forgotten, duties are unnamed, good, bad and guilt are unknown, with you I exist outside of the normal existence with all its constraints, must dos and shouldn't dos.

I am seeking you; together we will defy conventions, change the norms and uphold new values of our own making.

Passion, my missing companion! Where will I find you?

In one or many women? In one or many men? In my children? In my search for faith? In my pursuit of power? In the accumulation of money? In fighting for a cause? In writing about you? In all of these?

Maybe. I don't really know! What I know for sure is where not to look for you. I know for sure that I will not find you in any of the dwarfs encumbering my life.

All of you, who wake up at a certain time and sleep at a certain time, and who drink just certain amounts and only at specific hours; all of you who never go beyond what is allowed, who hides your intentions, and who never ask the questions that matter; all of you, who never show your true feelings, and who never get drunk just from another person’s presence; all of you who are slaves to your schedules, to your agendas and to your material possessions, who are subservient to your money, and who feel pain when you are giving and a secret joy when you are taking; all of you who start all your sentences with “I”, and who are living in your egos and for your egos, who don’t see the beauty of the other even when it hits you in your face; all of you dwarfs, stay away from me, you are disgusting away my passion! I am relentlessly fighting to keep you out of my life! You are blocking my passion’s line of sight. You are disallowing my passion from seeing me. I know that her path has crossed mine few times, and because of you we missed each other. In the midst of all your rules, conventions, slavery, and self-centeredness she is not finding me and if by chance she does, she sees me surrounded by all of you, so she thinks I am like you and she goes looking for another companion somewhere else.

All the giant people you admire, follow and pray for, have left their imprint on this world and on each of you through their powerful passion. From scientists, to prophets, through kings and warlords, revolutionaries and state leaders, innovators and writers, philosophers and poets, artists and creators. From their passion, something powerful, everlasting has emerged. Their passion has changed the course of this world, has dominated you, has obsessed you and will continue to have the same hold on you. You have been creating rules and conventions to protect yourselves from the strong, exhilarating and liberating embrace of passion. These desperate antidotes against passion are poisoning my life, and they will eventually poison yours!

All of you, dwarfs, be gone from my life!

At the brink of dying, I will hold you responsible for every second I spent away from passion. I will not find you any excuses when the passing time is delivering me to the awaiting death. I will damn you and everyone that looks, thinks, and behaves like you when the awaiting death is taking me away from my passion!

Disappear from my life! Make way for passion to meet me! Leave me! Leave me to live and die with my passion!