For much of my life, I’ve been a pretty passionate person, a PPP, if you will. Not a “pretty” person who’s passionate, but… you know what I mean. I live well when I’m passionately pursuing purpose. A PPP PPP-ing. Okay, enough of that pointless, preposterous poppycock.
I’m not a philosopher with a well-thought-out-but-poorly-written existentialist work. I don’t have a theory of life called Forrester-ism. Forrestism? Forrestianism? Anyway, I don’t have a well-defined system, but I have generally sought to live passionately. I want to have a passion and live fully for it. I want to put my “all” into something. I want to be engaged, focused, and striving for excellence in something. That’s a passionate life and that’s a good way for me to live. Like anyone else, I sometimes live well and sometimes I don’t live well.
The first problem I’ve encountered is this: what is the something that you’re striving towards? What are you passionately putting your “all” into? Is it a creative passion, such as painting or making music? Or maybe it’s your job or academic field? Maybe you want to be the best dentist you can be, or study coral reefs, or bake the best cookies ever, or design cool bikes. But sometimes it’s more narrow, like you want to win a specific championship or win a certain award or love that one person? That leaves you open to the possibility that you’ll lose. But you still have to continue on.
Another problem is how high we set our sights. Theoretically we can set our sights at infinity, and accept where we land. “I want to paint, so I set my sights on the ultimate, infinitely good, perfect painting ability. I strive towards that for my life, and however good my paintings are, that’s that.” I kind of like this idea because of its simplicity. I’m passionate about X, so I’ll strive for the ultimate version of X, and that’s it. That’s how we got Michelangelo, Mozart, and… Michael Jordan? I don’t know, I was going for a triple, single-named alliteration but I couldn’t think of another single-named “M” person that’s among the best in their field.
Anyway, Michelangelo painted awesome paintings, Mozart composed awesome compositions, and Michael Jordan basketed some awesome balls. They were all passionate about those things, they set their sights high, and they did pretty well. But, you know, Michael Jordan wasn’t practicing basketball at every moment of every day. He loves golfing and gambling and making money from shoe sales [who made the shoes, anyway?], so he was always making decisions about how much to train, how much to practice, how much to relax, how much to golf, how much to enjoy his money, and so on. That’s not even a unique feature of my prescribed passion-filled life. Decision-making is a curse we all endure.
The point is that you can’t [and shouldn’t] do just one thing at all times. Like I can sit here and say, “Hey, I like writing. I write books. I wanna be a great writer. That’s my passion. Everything I do is about writing. There’s nothing else.” Can’t really do that. Yes, it’s my passion, but I still have to eat food, so I’d like the food to be kinda good and kinda healthy. I still have to go places, so I’d like to have a cool bike or something. What I’m trying to say is that, no matter what your passion is, there will always be surrounding things in your life, like where you live, how much money you have, whether or not you have a cool bike. The “meat and potatoes” of your life, so to speak.
You want it to be good, you hope it’s good, you work hard to make it good, but you can always imagine it all as the perfect, ultimate version of it. I could walk to the store, buy a ticket for $2, and win $100 million. With that I could get a better apartment in a nicer place, a cool bike, and I could ride it around and such. But it’s foolish to expect that to happen, obviously. I can imagine the nicest apartment, the coolest bike, the perfect partner, nice neighbors and so on. I can imagine everything going perfectly for me, but it’s not going to, so I’m left with this difficult balance between trying for my best life and accepting/enjoying the life I currently have. For me, that imagining, that envisioning of success and achievement and a better life is part of what drives me to do it. So I gotta imagine to get myself going, but I can’t imagine too much cause that kinda fucks me up. Shit’s tough, man. I’ll work on it. I’LL BE BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER, maybe.
Lefty Forrester 