Passion

Passion Junkies via @frogdesign.

I've thought about this a lot, but I never quite know how to answer the question of what I'm most passionate about. I really like a lot of things -- design, art, technology, food, wine, cooking, books, singing, piano, firespinning, bellydancing -- but am I really passionate about any of them? I don't know. Some of them I barely do anymore, some of them I don't do at all. To me, passion equals commitment, and I'm really, really bad at commitment.

I feel like I should be passionate about design since that's my profession. I like it, and I like my job, but would I do it if I weren't being paid for it? Maybe, but I'd only do it for myself, not for clients, and I'd call it art, not design, which is perhaps just a matter of semantics.

I want to say I'm passionate about art, but I feel like passion should be something that's effortless, that you do because you enjoy it. Sometimes I feel like art for me is like a bad relationship -- it's great when it works, but it doesn't work very often and I spend most of my time feeling bad about it. It's under my skin, though, and I can't just walk away from it. I feel like my whole career might have been based on an attempt to walk away, and it just hasn't quite worked out that well.

I'm currently reading Sacré Bleu by Christopher Moore, and there's a whole lot of passion about art and the madness that seems to accompany it. It's not the happy passion of the Frog Design employees in the video, it's the dark self-effacing passion of wanting to be good at something and never believing that you are or can be. Are they both equally valid, two sides of the same creative coin? The book is also, being a Christopher Moore book, really funny and maybe that's the key. I feel like a lot of the problem with passion is that it can makes you take yourself way too seriously, and if you'd just chill out and enjoy the process (and ignore the seemingly demonic woman named Bleu, how symbolic is that?), you'd be fine.

What's your passion? Does it make you happy, or does it make you sad, and is the proper answer a little of both?