🐶 On Passions

I was cleaning my inbox today. I went from 1500+ unread emails to zero in 2 days. Going through infinite amount of emails that I never read, I felt like going through the diary of my past and current interests. Themes and topics I subscribed to fully assured in my commitment, only to never open them ever again. If anything, they were the evidence of my confusing younger self simple-mindedly jumping from one to another, never really developing a strong interest.

I envy people who develop such passions and able to develop strong relationship with them. They are experts, or just enthusiasts (not the ones who use this word in their LinkedIn tagline) and their speech about the subject of their passion is naturally easy and simple, without subtracting from the complexity of such passions. They showcase innate knack for those little details that casual observers like myself tend to miss.

And there are people who flood and abuse someone’s attention with superficiality, fake it with too many words and too long sentences. Caring more about stylized and romanticized visual aspects of their interests as they document them on social media. Worrying about how much these interests add to their otherwise shallow personalities.

As we walk through the park, too quite because it’s finally snowing (and that’s why it’s beautiful), I realize that I failed to develop such deep passions myself. My interests and hobbies tend to stay superficial, shallow, abandoned on the half-way or landed in a safe, and thus boring space of a banal curiosity. Despite my numerous attempts to change the course, it was inevitable that all of my interest pursuits stumbled in a weird place, where I knew that there is more to it, something deeper and advanced, yet I could not access it. I feel the burden of knowing what it is exactly in there, yet that knowledge feels like a paraphrasing of someone else’s experiences, rather than mine.

It is becoming increasingly evident that I tend to be someone who can be called a “generalist,” despite my attempts to specialize. Generalist as in someone  who is generally good at everything is a wishful thinking, while the reality is that I am generally average-to-bad in everything. Having set-up too many fishing rods in an attempt to catch as many as possible, I caught very few.

I have to admit, it is not without its benefits. It does allow my mind to quickly jump from one thing to another and switch contexts and adapt faster. It does allow me to comprehend the totality of different experiences that make up the whole of “world” and “life” and in doing so, appreciate the invisible intricacies. To specialize, it appears to me, and may be wrongfully so, is to arbitrary limit myself to few, when there is so much more to explore.

Ironically, as outlined previously, the act of exploration for me usually stops at this weird place, between not being a beginner and yet, not being able to advance further, but sensing that there is more hidden from the eye. It is a state of ambivalence, a state of a pregnant pause, sometimes of a momentary stagnation too — just before your interest matures into passion or slowly becomes listless.

Yet there is one passion that never faded away from me, and grew stronger over time. The one I keep coming back to, where I find a safe heaven for my distracted mind. My passion for her.