What if each day of life only required one thing of us—to love it more than the last?

Worries would dissolve with the dawn. The hours of fretting would pass into a time that only children could recall in stories—tales of heroes, villains and well-worn aphorisms.

The taste of victory would linger, for on this day the exuberant acceptance of all that is bevels the edges of ambition just enough to allow for just a little more expansion.

How many of us live with such passion?

Without this kind of loving our days create vapid chasms. We supplant the invocation of our real selves with stuff, things and substances. The layers of addiction range from subtle to grotesque. In the absence of this kind of love, this kindness and graceful disposition, life becomes something to carve out. It scrapes our insides into caverns where no light shines besides the dimly lit intellect—the intersection of folly and hubris.

How many of us live lives of quiet desperation?

Some will try to build a bridge between their vapid existence and unrealized passion using bricks of comparison. This is hardly a bridge, but more of a disheveled pile—a weight. You see, passion is like the blue sky frosted with wispy clouds. It is like a bird who pecks away at a dead carcass in a busy intersection—a movement just before a car speeds by, the gesture of flapping its wings miraculously lifting it from earth to sky. Calamity is evaded.

Passion can wait until the last second to signal to its host, “It is time for action.” It can lay dormant for years under the weight of trying to fit in.

At times, passion has to be coaxed out by unfettered inspirations. Nature teaches us the exercise of faith by bringing us to the edge of death every night, dimming the light to shear nothingness before the promise of a new day dawns. She is illuminating that the path to excellence includes sleeping with our shadows.

“It’s hard.” “I can’t do this.” “I’ve had enough.”

These are the declarations of the darkness—a place void of vision. Most of us sleep right through this. Most of us is really all of us if we regard humanity like the ocean. Some of us are waves that crash on the shore and some are just waves that fold back into themselves.

How many of us feel lost at sea?

How many of us are stretching our arms out and pressing against the resistance in a way that results in a buoyancy—the gesture of swimming. Here now, it’s okay. Most of us sink the first time we get into the murky seas of life. Most of us, much like all of us, can hardly decipher what kind of fish we are because we are all fish in water, beholden to our nature.

Then something happens. It does not matter how old or young you are. It is as if the primordial sludge you began as cannot help but evolve forward. Questions arise. Curiosity peaks. Obsession with creation demands focus. A dizzy feeling of orgasm with no source of defined stimuli begins to sweep through your body.

There it is! Passion.

It has been in you this whole time. Just beyond the edges of your questioning, “Why?” it was there. It was waiting for you to stop worrying about how. It was wondering if you would stop trying to define it. It was yelling at you that this day is not promised, but as long as you wake it will wake with you as if you were the sunrise itself. Because you are. You are the dawn. You are the morning light.

We work so hard in this life to “have” enough and to “be” enough. We break our hearts, our backs and our bodies for it.

How many of us are looking to you to be the one to lead the way?

Go boldly in the direction of your dreams. They have been gifted to you. Each moment is a choice to pay a price for your freedoms. What are you willing to trade?

Passion will never let you down if you are willing to be a worthy partner. It will run with you. It will guide you. It will stir your senses and scare you sh*tless. And at the end of this day’s loving it will tuck you in with this sweet reminder:

You did not come here to be fixed, but to remember that you have never been broken.

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Author: Rebekah McClaskey

Image: Larisa Birta/Unsplash

Editor: Toby Israel

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