We headed to our friend's parent's summer place today, to celebrate the 8th birthday of my wife's goddaughter and more importantly, eat waffles with fresh berries and cream. It was a hard day. The cottage is a typical Finnish summer place, but it is quite a cute little place set into the forest and not too far from the lake. Our daughter loves everything about cottage life except, outdoor toilets. She is a bit of a princess in this regard, but I don't really blame her much.
It has been a pretty chilled weekend for midsummer and we haven't had to stress too much over schedules or being somewhere as we have mostly kicked it around the neighborhood and just enjoyed #homelife in the summer - barbecuing, spending time outside and not doing too much of anything. Yesterday, I did fire-up the chainsaw for the first time and cut a bit of the wood, but I didn't make much of a dent before heading off to the beach.
Posts like the one on curation I added yesterday take me a fair bit of time to put together as I can't just flow thoughts like I normally would and it wears me down more because of it. A lot of the benefits of writing for me is the "taking of space" to order my head and get out what is on my mind, something that I really wish everyone would do more of.
The other day while having a drink together with friends, we were talking about how most people get themselves into trouble early by believing they know what they are good at and will enjoy later on in life, which rarely works. We often choose our "career path" based on what we think will earn us something rather than spend time exploring to find out what we could fall in love with. @dswigle was writing yesterday about passion and I think that this ties in with our early process.
Choosing what will make us money might not be a bad move early on, as I think that for most of us, we are far too immature and inexperienced to understand what it actually means to be passionate about something. These days, it might even be worse as I think what people mistake for passion is more lust - and while this is often seen in relationships, it is applied to other factors of life too.
We desire something based on a naive perspective and "get passionate" about it but not for long enough to actually fall in love with it. Commitment is largely dead in the new world generations as they live the disposable life, with a buy and discard attitude to everything - so they skip and jump around topics being "passionate" in the some way a one nightstand is loving.
For me at least, I think that passion sneaks up while doing something that might not even be that interesting to begin with and then, something happens to change the attention. Often, something small and relatively insignificant can be the catalyst to draw a bit more energy and perhaps change the perspective, to think again on what it means to do this or that - and then the dive down the rabbit hole begins.
As I have said before, I believe the "love what you do and you'll never work a day" saying is bullshit and buying into the idea gets people into trouble. The hardest someone can ever work in their lives is doing something they love because as they say, love is boundless, it just keeps on demanding more and more. When people have been conditioned to believe that work is something to be avoided, it creates a conflict and a barrier to actually finding that passionate task as generally, the investment on the work side has to be done before the passion arrives. Finding passion is hard work.
Speaking of hard work, this little, wooden building was built 38 years ago and I am glad to say, it is in pretty good condition. The cottage owners are the parent's of our neighbor and owned the house across the road prior to them purchasing it from them. This storage and outdoor toilet was built by the person who built our house, a land developer who did many of the houses in the area. It is cool to see the connections between places, the little strings of familiar that tie the area and the people together through time.
I am not sure if I am a passionate person myself, but I am definitely not afraid of commitment or work so perhaps one day, it'll sneak up and bite me. Maybe it already has, and I am too busy doing it to notice how I feel about it. Ever notice that when you are in the zone, emotions are irrelevant? This could be a side of The devil finds work for idle hands. It is probably better to work for a passion rather than letting the devil choose for us.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]