Did He Have Passion?

‘Did he have passion?’ – That’s a quote from the movie Serendipity which has been floating around in my head for the last month or so.

There have been a couple of deaths in my family in the last month or so, so obituaries are on my brain. Funerals are never fun events (or topics, sorry please bear with me) but they certainly make people stop and think. I don’t know about you, but funerals always make me think of two questions:

1. What can I do to help those who are in the eye of the sadness storm? Obviously I’m very sad that the person has gone but unless it’s myself at the eye of the storm then I feel incredibly sad for those who were closest to the departed soul and want to do what I can to help those people in whatever way I can.
2. What am I doing with my life? I don’t think I’m alone in this, funerals do provide a bit of self-inspection for many of us. During the funeral itself I’m thinking about the person who is no longer with us and all of those who are affected by their death. Afterwards though I tend to think about my own life. How would my obituary read? Would I be satisfied with it? and if not then what can I do to change it now?

It’s that second question that I’ve been thinking about and is where the ‘Did he have passion?’ quote comes in. You see, I don’t have kids nor am I going to be having kids and obituaries are full of stories about the person’s children and sometimes grandchildren. These are wonderful and relevant stories for many people but they won’t be for me. I’m not complaining or wanting your pity, I’m just curious about what will be appropriate for me.

This is where passion comes in. An obituary which read along the lines of –

“Jane was a wonderful person. She worked at her job for many years, loved her husband, was liked by her colleagues and in her spare time was amazingly good at playing card games.”

– would be pretty miserable in my opinion. It’s not that I don’t want to be liked by colleagues. It’s not that I’m not amazingly good at playing card games 😉

BUT there has to be MORE. There has to be PASSION.

If the ancient greeks asked their question of me, I would hope the answer is YES. I intend to remind myself of this question every time I find myself procrastinating instead of chasing my dreams. I want to live a life of passion both to have enjoyed living it and so that the glitter that my life leaves on the world will be filled with sparkly passion.