Passion

Some months ago I planted a passion fruit creeper. The purple flowers of this creeper are strange and exotic, different from any flower I’ve ever seen - and I eagerly looked forward to the blossoming of the passion flower and later of the fruit.

When the creeper died soon after for no reason I could fathom, I took it as a bad sign.

What is life, after all, without passion?

Those free-marketeers who claim their mantra as “greed is good” have got it wrong. It’s not greed, but passion that built Microsoft or Porsche or any of the great companies.

It’s an individual’s passion for his or her art and craft that’s given us great painting, literature, music, theatre, film. Passion is behind all remarkable scientific discoveries and inventions, behind the sportsman’s achievements, behind every dream and aspiration.

Anything that truly matters in this world, anything of any value is touched by passion. It’s what makes us live life more fully, enables us to fulfill our deepest and noblest desires.

To push files in an office, to sell an insurance policy or vegetables needs no passion. The mundane is carried out almost mechanically. Its driving force is the need to earn money.

They say that human history is but the struggle between passion and prudence. And only when passion triumphs do great things result.

The day we stop feeling “the intoxication of passion” as one philosopher put it, is surely the day we die a little. Like my poor creeper.