While pursuing a passion can be enthralling, it can also be a battle between deciding whether it is an obsessive or harmonious passion. Once we decide I enjoy engaging in a certain activity, for example writing, I wonder if I write to get the job done or if I truly enjoy it.
Even when I’m equipped with a passion to write, sentences are constructed by words that are challenging to stack. Sometimes, passion itself isn’t all that writers need because they are passively forced to produce creative work.
In the research paper Image of Everyday Creativity. An Individual Case of a Person with Passion, there are two mentioned streams of passion, in which there is harmonious (adaptive) and obsessive (maladaptive) passion. To get into this, researchers explained examples of people’s activities based on their passions. Harmonious passion is autonomous when done with the natural correlation of someone’s interest. It takes a natural process to accept that they are passionate about a certain activity and they do not feel controlled by the consequence of their action. They are willing to turn their emotions to be positive in order to engage in the activity. When passion does not overwhelm them, a positive correlation between creativity is found in harmonious passion.
For example, we could never turn the river to flow uphill from downhill. The river flows from a starting point that gravitates downstream to end at a broader water surface by the sea. Our mind works the same. By letting the flow go, the cognitive process releases the ability to birth new ideas.
Staying on the harmonious stream does not engage with external demand but we are excused to make autonomous decisions that risk lighter opportunities for growth. For example, while we look for inspirations, we tend to seek the works created to please our taste and by creating the soft duplicate of an inspiration, we feel a sense of creative safety. Harmonious passion is not a feeling determined by pure creativity or joy in creating art, but the sense of safety to induce new challenges so we could be open to new types of activity. After all, the key to self-development is formed out of curiosity and a sprinkle of risk.
However having a harmonious passion does not mean we can always go with the flow. If we stick to this type of passion as a safe zone, then there is nothing worth creating, or could be said, there is no use in bringing passion as an excuse in the first place. Why bother creating something out of your sincere passion if it does not give you a room for new challenges? Creativity is born out of perseverance is one of the processes in making us human.
With this mindset, sometimes we feel that pressures are coming from many sides which leads us to have an obsessive (maladaptive) passion that only demands us to engage in an activity that identifies with negative motivation. We turn to the mindset of wanting to just get it done and seeing the outcome grow in quantity. This is the starting point of growing an obsessive passion. Why are we doing what we love to do if we befriend suffering in the process?
This is probably why: Society demands us to do what they virtue.
No matter how conducive we are to engaging in the activity we are passionate about, there is no use making it an achievement to prove to society since society does not see progress as an achievement. In society’s eyes, no ends are worth pursuing, especially if the value that they pursue is for them to gain collective happiness.
An excerpt from the book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do by Michael J. Sandel mentioned:
“Whether my skills yield a lot or a little depends on what the society happens to want.”
This directs to the entertaining bits that people want to see and ditch the less valuable creativity made by people. If the drive to create a work is to gain validation from society, then we are classifying the meaning of the previous statement. As we are living in the age of catastrophic consumerism, the end goal of creating art can be to feed the eyes of society. The passion held by an artist could be misled to gain validation rather than creating a sincere personal statement.
As I am writing this, I focus on my selfish reason to write in the most sincere way to please my passion. Anyone who writes would understand that their words come off subjective to the tone they want to convince the readers. Imagining the purpose of writing to completely please the audience would mean I gain nothing from my hobby. But then again, this exact piece of mind I am sharing is what we accept as passion. This is what we all fight to call a harmonious passion because we want a positive experience to be gained out of the activity.
People who write well are rewarded as good writers. Poets are awarded. But we writers who choose words every day tend to see that we are merely passionate.
How about we move the perspective this way: Rather than going on with the flow to find new ideas, we should be able to determine our best pace to avoid working too hard or too unpinned.
This article is a letter to someone who never wants to run out of words to please theirself . Who never wants to believe that the flow is the safe zone, but to have their own pace in exchanging ideas be it by writing or reading.
As I believe that passion is growing an idea from a seed into a tree, passion is a work in progress whose object is us humans. We have always been a whole being who pursues constant changes whether we realize it or not. We bloom through seasons and passion is what makes us human.
Read the original blog post here.
References:
Uszyńska-Jarmoc, J., & Kunat, B. (2022). Image of everyday creativity. an individual case of a person with passion. Creativity. Theories – Research - Applications, 9(2), 94–118. https://doi.org/10.2478/ctra-2022-0013
Sandel, M.J. (2016) Justice: What’s the right thing to do? Vancouver, B.C.: Langara College.
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