What makes your heart beat?

What pumps hot blood through your veins like fire?

What keeps you awake at night and yanks you from bed in the morning to get started again?

What drives you, compels you, excites you?

What do you love?

Passion as Gratitude

Life was created for you to live it. And I mean truly, deeply, passionately live it.

It was meant for you to take it by the horns and wrestle it to the ground, feeling the push and pull of the dynamic that is life in each step of every day.

The more passion you can muster for the good things of life, as a matter of fact, the happier you will be. In once sense, passion for what God has created is one way to express gratitude for the blessing of life, the opportunity given to live it, the possibilities made available to us, and the desire we have to deeply drink of its beauty and not waste the precious moments.

Yearn to Learn

So go out and explore life. Learn the lessons of it waits to teach you. Learn why things happen the way they do. Develop a yearning for learning.

So many people spend so much pf their precious time sitting on their rear ends watching others pretend to live in half-hour clips of mind- and moral-numbing entertainment. You were not made to view the pretended lives of others acting out scripts on stages through boxes in living rooms.

You were meant to find passion and excitement. You were meant to find purpose and meaning. You were meant to explore and expand and excite and create and develop and build and do.

Learn something new every day of your life. Never let a day go by that you don’t gain some insight, develop a degree of wisdom, come to understand something you didn’t before.

Be curious. Feed your curiosity. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, as the saying goes. It lit up the sky, shrunk the earth, cured disease, put us in the air and on the moon and below the waves and in 100 story buildings.

Hunger to learn. Pick an instrument and learn to play it. Learn to dance or do Taekwondo. Learn to sew or scrapbook or bake or fish or bike or fix the radiator. And never stop. When you graduate, keep learning. Read. Discover. Grow.

What do you want to do? What would you like to learn? What talents or skills or abilities or hobbies would you like to pursue? Name them, then pursue them!

Technology has done so much to shrink the world. Use it for good! Learn something for free online. Get together with like-minded people and work together on those things for which you feel the stirrings of passion. Stir those flames and act on the inspiration to lift and grow and become!

Paint and write and dance and sing and play and climb and explore and sculpt and repair and cook and write and volunteer and improve and pray and serve.

Love = Passion

Reach out to others. Love them. Forgive them. Embrace them. Get passionate about them. Let your heart feel the beat of their hearts.

Reach out to others in need. Lift and encourage those who are struggling to cope with life.

Be an example of love. BE love.

Think about others. Take time to be with others. Cherish them. The more passionate you are about people, the greater joy you will feel in living.

But start close to home. Love your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings. Love them so much you can ignore their weaknesses and forgive their shortcomings.

Be passionate about loving yourself too! Accept who you are even while working to learn and grow and overcome. Stare into the mirror and have no judgment, think no ill will, feel no regret. Just feel love.

Choose Passion … Choose Happiness

Decide to live with passion. It is, after all, so much more a choice than you realize. You can wake up and laze around the house for hours on end and do just enough in life to get by, or you can choose to make life matter, to do something creative or adventurous or meaningful. You can shrink into the corner of your life or step into the sunshine of more love and kindness and compassion and gratitude … and passion.

Live life passionately and fill your life with things you can feel passionate about.

So, turn off the TV. Open the door. Go outside. Look around. What needs changing? Figure out a way to change it! What needs doing? Figure out a way to go do it! Who needs you? Figure out a way to serve them!

Get passionate about life! Get passionate about living! And then pause for a moment and enjoy the passion of a happy life well lived!

Please share your thoughts in the comments

What are you passionate about?

Photo by Pixaby