The Passion Diaries 

To speak of "purpose" is to perceive its absence. To pursue "purpose" is to both acknowledge its absence and believe in the possibility of its presence. The concept itself (purpose) develops out of a palpable lack within the individual—an insufferable internal void—the trademark vestige of one who long ago turned away from the path of life for life’s sake. He is one with those harboring the emptiness of a man who, as he came upon the crossroads of Life and Something Like It, experienced a state of newly heightened consciousness and took pause; one who, suddenly awakened—suddenly aware of the weight of his own autonomy—stood vis-à-vis life and rejected it. He cast his mind’s eye to the north and saw the unconditioned and mistook it for a threat; to the east he saw conditioned intimations and mistook them for promises, and he turned.

This turning, this wanting, is one with rejection. The paradox—to choose the tangential venture is to refuse to accept life as its own purpose; but it is this refusal that first hypostasizes “purpose” as its lack, and it is only in the aftermath of the decision that man experiences the presence of the absence and dubs it a state of "purposelessness". The road he chooses is the road to perdition—the path of he who makes of his life a mission to fill a borderless void.

I speak of purpose, but what of passion?

In my earliest pursuits I operated under the preconceived notion that purpose would emerge from the perfect alchemy of passion and practicality. I set out to perfect this undisclosed equation. In my mind it looked something like this:

A = Passion; B = Practicality; C = Purpose; X = Subjectivity; AX + BX = C

My pursuit of “purpose” became a quest for the means to bridge the gap that acts the barrier between the necessary evil of bland dogmatic practicality and the fiery, untenable expanses of passion. For quite some time I hoped to reconcile the two and force their fusion. Where this forced fusion played the dangling carrot, my every endeavor proved an exercise in futility.

I always found myself stuck between schisms. I’ve always been too nerdy to be cool, too eclectic and eccentric to be a nerd, too artistic to be an intellectual and too short on confidence and conviction to embrace the role of the starving artist. I’m smart but silly; a bit nutty and neurotic, but not quite crazy. I’m prone to epiphanies and ephemera and epiphanies of ephemeral merit. I can be quite sensible, but nothing about me quite makes sense.

Mulling over mental preservations—the immaterial fossils of younger years—I remember a different me. I remember a girl headstrong and brimming with passion. I see her as I see a character in a movie. The face is familiar, but it is an image and nothing more. An image is an apprehension exclusive to the occupants of distant perches, and it is that same distance that bars the witness from genuine knowledge of the living, breathing, thinking, feeling being within. Such is the nature of a face…a façade. I remember that foregone girl of my childhood; I remember her face. I remember her being, but I cannot remember being her.

    The uncontested passion of youth was short-lived. “Trial and error" began to ring of insanity—doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Time and experience and consequential error upon consequential error rendered my spirit threadbare. My pursuit of passion was to no avail. It was not until unwitting participation and unprecedented experiences ignited my passions anew that I began to understand the futility of my previous endeavors.

A misguided pursuit does not necessarily preclude worthwhile discovery. Misdirection needn't beget failure, as one often finds what one seeks in unexpected places. Likewise, one often garners enjoyment and satisfaction from things one never thought to seek. However, these otherwise benign misconceptions often engender a characteristic peripheral blindness that renders them malignant.

Passion is not to be found in the external world. It does not exist actually or independent of the impassioned subject. One can no sooner find passion in the external world than one can find an object that is 'happiness' or 'sadness'. These are not things. They have no material reality—no independent existence. I cannot imagine one would argue otherwise; so, why do we so often speak of a desire or attempt to “find happiness” or to “find passion”? The error is not merely semantic. It is an equivocation that reinforces a false belief—a belief that all too often drives the believer in his countless vain pursuits of wild-geese.

Life without passion seems hardly worth living. But...I seem to recall life before passion. What's the difference? If passion is essential, its absence palpable, its presence desirable but ever elusive, how does one proceed from a state of enlightened lifelessness? I'm convinced that the answer lies somewhere in the void. 

“Man is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” (Sartre)

Here goes nothin'...

~ Lauren