Passion

Whatever happened to pure, unadulterated passion?

It’s been a night of rather intense debate. From a round table on the 10th floor to a lone chat-box that pops up on my screen at 1.30am. It is a curious activity. First, everyone glances at each other shyly across the table, eyes darting this way and that. Anything, to avoid engagement. Second, the first hints of opinions and observations start to emerge. They start off polite and apologizing, barely skimming the surface. Describing and explaining, rather than critiquing. The arguments now start to circle each other in a cautious dance, careful not to step on another’s toes. We’re heading somewhere now, layers are built upon layers, questions are growing increasingly audacious, daring to probe deeper, antagonising those sore, sensitive spots.

And before we know it, we are launching into a full-fledged, all-gloves-off war of words and opinions and ideals.

T, in his usual fashion, put forward an annoyingly confronting question, to which we were to respond on first instinct. In the event that we were to destroy the whole mechanism of house church, what would you be doing on a Saturday afternoon? Sans responsibility, sans structure. What’s the first thing that comes to m—?

Of course, my mind snapped to you.

And like a free association exercise that could have taken place in Freud’s lazy arm-chair, it was so telling indeed. Just like that, it became clear as day. All manner of alarms angrily ringing their little brass bells off in every possible cavity of my mind. Every erroneous belief, every pretentious front, every little white lie that I’ve told myself to conceal the ugly truth of the matter, every corner that I’ve tried to cut just to make ends meet – exposed.

It’s opened up a Pandora’s box of conundrums.

For me, it seemed to all come down to the issue of authenticity. I’ve learnt it in Social Psychology 101. My supervisor herself has dedicated her research career to the study of the self and the constant, struggling tensions between the ‘actual’ and the ‘ought’. Let’s not even factor ‘ideal’ into this equation for the moment. In short, it’s the battle between the person we are, and the person we should be; and to what extent the discrepancy between the two, can somehow be reconciled, fused into a single entity.

There are so many things that I ought to do. There are far greater passions that I should be taking upon my shoulders. Here enters ‘ideal’. Those giddy, grand notions of Doctors without Borders, joining the Peace Corp for a year, spending a month in Africa helping the starving children, and so forth.

Actually, let’s not even go that far. Heck, I have trouble loving the hyper-active kid at the Flemington flats, who really, just gets on my nerves. I shun the straggly-haired lady that pleads for a gold coin at my stop after work in Albert Park. I’ll even pretend to cross the street and circle back around, just so that I don’t need to lie to her face that ‘I have no change.’ I can’t seem to find it in myself to look the old man on the tram in the eye, plagued by his insanity, muttering curses under his breath to an unseen villain conjured up by his schizophrenia.

And when I grow up, I want to be a psychologist.

Don’t misunderstand, I whole-heartedly acknowledge the importance of enlarging your tent. To be homo-sapien is almost synonymous with selfish ambition. And if no one had the resolve to go against the grain, to fight against their natural egocentric instincts, to say ’sometimes you’ve got to do things you don’t necessarily like to do’ – the world would probably have imploded by now. It’s like trying to get up on a frigid winter’s morning. If it didn’t come down to that split-second of willpower – that burst of psychic energy that prompted you to first kick your legs off the bed, you’d probably never emerge from under your doona.

Everything else seems to follow after the initial hurdle. It’ll be easier after you take the first step. Or so they say.

But my question here pertains to authencity. Are those bigger-than-myself resolutions that finds themselves on every ‘1000 things that I want to do before I die’ checklists there by default, by choice, or because of some warped idea that doing it would be nothing more than ‘cool’. At what point do those (very noble) aspirations become integrated into one’s core, so much so that they are inseparable? Self consumed by passion, passion subsumed into self. One and the same.

Frankly speaking, I know I’m not there yet.

And so I have a battery of crucial questions that now I, ask myself:
How many hours of each day am I present to the moment?
How much of what I say, the actions that I undertake reflect the truth of who I really am about?
What are you really doing right now?

The next time I’m up late watching Sex and the City, I’ll say it. The next time I’m putting my innermost thoughts into print, I’ll say it, damn it.

What am I so ashamed of? Why am I so afraid of how you perceive me?

I want to find a way that I can worship authentically, to pray without the vocabulary of a Sunday school catch-phrase book. I want to be able to say that I am ‘Christian’ without feeling like a complete fraud. I want to feel pride instead of shame when I mention that I am a follower of Jesus Christ. And I want people to be able to understand in a tangible way, what this means. I want to stop shunning the saying of grace before every meal, or stumbling clumsily over my words when I finally am coerced into the task. It is after all, the very natural courtesy to thank the Lord for every blessing, with every ounce of gratitude that I have in my heart. I want to know the God I claim to be in conversation with every time I clasp my hands and utter a prayer.

So that even though, I may not have all the answers, or be the most eloquent of speakers; even when the actual is a million miles away from the ought/ideal – the truth will be like a shaft of light that chases out the darkness, revealing the fallacies of my doubts and insecurities; and like a sword of clarity, pierce through the lies of cynicism.

Dig deep, until you can feel the earthiness of your core. Listen to the still, small whisper that speaks ever so meekly, ever so subtly, hovering above the congestion of the traffic and the sounds of a busy world. It’s only just barely there. But oh, how I am confident that when it reveals itself to me, it will ring ever so true.

I need to find my feet.