This past Saturday night, my cousin Mustafa came to stay over. So from midnight till 2am we were chatting about things that we need to learn from other people's lives, so that we save that extra effort, which if learnt via other's experiences will save us the time but impart us the same learning!
Mustafa opened his heart to me about passion. He said, "You are passionate about reading and writing and Rushabh (Turakhia) is passionate about technology. I don't know what I'm passionate about?"
I feel passion arises from interest. My interest was always in activities which required no dependency on other human beings' participation. Since a young age I delved into books. I remember my father buying 'The Book of Virtues' by William Bennett (over a good 500 pages) when I was 12 or 13 years old. Also, I have to credit my father for my writing skills as I started writing original words when I used to write letters to him when he was working in the gulf. International phone calls were super expensive in those days. Writing letters had a spill over effect on my essays in English class in school.
And since then I have invested a lot of time, energy and money in my interest, which today is my passion.
Knowing Mustafa, I feel he is as lost as me! He wanted to discuss about finding our place in this world rather than passion, because I know that music his passion; which he probably doesn't feel! (Mustafa, you may correct me if I'm wrong)
Our discussion moved from passion to purpose. We discussed how we don't know what to do in life. What is our aim in life? What skills are we good at? He said, that his mind is wavering. He wants to do so many things and doesn't know what to do and more importantly, when to do?
I shared my secret with him. I feel that I can be a great photographer, film maker, writer, artist, businessman, orator, etc. etc. To which he too shared that he has many 'ideas' of a profession in mind.
I feel, at this stage of our lives we feel that we can conquer anything. We can do anything we choose to and we will succeed. So it is normal to have a thought process like that. But we also have our share of doubt and lack of an aim which bogs us down. This feeling makes us question our existence on this planet.
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Being passionate about something helps us to lead a fulfilled personal life.
Having an aim is half the battle (of life) won!
