“I can’t find my passion!” – on Living a Patchwork Life

Written by: Jorinde Berben
Image credit: pixabay.com

We’re told everywhere to ‘Live your best life’, ‘Follow your bliss’ and ‘Find your passion’. Not being 100% clear on what your one true passion is can feel like you’re lacking something in your life. Like you’re behind on all those who already know what they want. You get tips on how to find it, such as ‘What would you do if money wasn’t an issue?’ Or ‘When do you feel like you can completely forget about time?’

My passion for writing has come and gone throughout my life. It’s the only one that has resurfaced often, but there have been years in which in didn’t play a major role in my life and I felt that I needed to find wat I TRULY was meant to be doing. What did the Universe really desire of me?

During the years I tried out many different things. Each time it felt like I had stumbled upon the one thing I was meant to be doing. From studying languages at University, to translating, to having my own business helping young parents. In my leisure activities you can find the same pattern. I had a time in which I knit all the time. There was a decade of dedication to music: first flute, then harp, then vocals. My entire family focused on badminton as a sport where I quit that after 1.5 years in order to start dancing for about a year, and then go swimming with a friend.

I used to think I just didn’t have the grit to stick it out when things got rough, to work through difficulties. But the fact is, none of those jobs or hobbies got difficult after time, on the contrary. I usually just kind of lost interest, or found a new passion to dive into.

After some time I started to refer to this as ‘my patchwork life’. Sure, I’ll never climb to the top of any ladder if I don’t stay on it for more than two or three rungs, but there are advantages to climbing many different ladders as well. Your life becomes an adventure that takes many different turns. You pick up different kinds of knowledge and bring that to each new passion, being able to enrich it further. You learn to adjust in different environments, with different skills and different kinds of people.

When I came across the talk below a few years ago, I finally felt like there was really nothing wrong with me. It’s perfectly fine to do something for a year or two and then quit again. It’s my life and I get to choose what I want to do, and more importantly, what I DON’T want to do.

So if you do have one great passion: that’s great! Go for it. But if you don’t, instead of looking for that one, ultimate goal in our lives; that one single passion that everything else will revolve around; perhaps, from time to time, we can ask ourselves: ‘What passion would I let go of if money and other people’s opinions were not an issue?’ Or ‘What activity was effortless and exciting before but has now lost its allure?’

And if you want to quit, feel free to quit and make room for something else. Life is long enough to have many passions and only you get to decide which ones are worthy of your time!