I love passion like Oprah loves bread (and I also love bread.)
The feeling of passion that inspires deep love, desire, anger, hatred, outrage, exasperation, reminds us we’re alive and kicking. This is good. For those of us who have experienced the lethargy of grief, these sparky emotions create a sense of something that may not be called “pleasant”, but could be called Phew.
When sorrow kicks in the door and we employ all our numbing agents to survive it, it’s often a huge relief just to feel anything other than sadness. Even being mad at the political system has been a welcome change of emotion for me from sadness. It’s a spark, and I don’t think feeling the spark is bad. But it can become bad if I respond to it without discipline because, for me, passion fuels words. And words start fires. (For other people, passion can fuel relationships or addictions or extreme decisions or fantastic decisions – it all depends on how we channel it.)
As I move further into this new life without Steve, I feel myself slowly waking up – a little like the way the anesthesia wears off after a root canal. I always want to eat as soon as I start to feel again, but I forget that I can’t feel enough yet to not bite my own cheek. And I’ve found that it’s possible to do a fair amount of self-injury, coming out of the sorrow stupor if I haven’t built in some boundaries for channeling passion in healthy ways. For me, the boundaries are:
- Truth-telling friends who are given plenty of opportunity to speak into my life.
- A determination to get myself out of my comfort zone (aka: my quiet house) because I’ve learned that things grow very, very big inside my own head and when I take those thoughts out into the real world, they quickly shrink down to their real size.
- A first-thing-every-morning meeting with myself to answer one main question that will order my day and my decisions: what does love require of me? Because love gives purpose to passion.
And even with these guard rails, I feel like I still blow it at least as often as I get it right. But passion is real and powerful, and feeling it is a gift. My big prayer at this stage of the game is to channel it well and wisely and my second big prayer is that our good and gracious God will keep the fallout contained when I don’t. He’s good that way, I think, even when I’m not.
With hope,
Bo
Well said, Bo. Stepping outside comfort zones and first-thing-in-the-morning meetings with myself and with God have certainly helped me with this new widow mantle that is mine.