Dear Life, I Am Going to Live With Passion

Reviewed and approved by the psychologist Valeria Sabater.

Written by Valeria Sabater

Last update: 15 November, 2021

Dear Life,

I want to say that I’m sorry for all the times I neglected you. I’m sorry for the times I didn’t take full advantage of everything you offered me. Now that I have overcome my fears, my shyness, and my prejudices, I promise to live with passion to dance with you until dawn, to love you, listen to you, and make you laugh until your stomach hurts and you are breathless. Because you and I understand each other and we deserve that joy.

Telling ourselves this at some point during our life implies a turning point, or as any lover of spirituality would say, “an awakening.” Nevertheless, we don’t always manage to use all of our resources and behaviors to make a firm commitment to ourselves so that we can enjoy the days ahead of us.

Perhaps the goal of living so intensely seems hedonistic, but there is a simple idea behind this vision that everyone from anthropologists to sociologists (including positivist psychologists) agrees on. All of the actions that human beings carry out have two very basic motivations: to survive, and when that is taken care of, to be happy.

Existing, opening our eyes every morning, putting one foot in front of the other and relating to each other are things that respond to a continuous process of “trial and error.” From this process, we learn little by little to achieve what we most desire: stability, inner peace, well-being, and in essence… happiness. To reach our goal we have to add one more ingredient to the recipe: passion.

The secret is to live your life with passion

Humanist psychology continues to be one of the most important and useful schools of thought in the field. At the same time, we can’t understand it without the help of the great minds of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. They were the first ones to point out that we are the masters of our own fulfillment. They said that we are the ones who must work every day for our personal growth and happiness.

Before Rogers and Maslow, other schools of thought like Freudian Psychoanalysis or even behaviorism defined us as passive beings incapable of influencing our surroundings. There is nothing further from the truth. As Rogers taught us, few things are as important for human beings as seeing themselves as functional and capable of changing what is around them by using four basic components: a flexible mind, a feeling of freedom, self-confidence, and an openness to experience.

At the same time, many psychologists with the same focus have added one more component that they call “passionate purpose”. To reach the self-realization at the top of Abraham Maslow’s pyramid and to have a significant and positive impact in our own lives, we need passion. With passionate purpose, a stable and faithful commitment takes shape in ourselves that allows us to confront adversity, forget our fears and worries and live every day full of motivation and the promise of our dreams.

From now on I am going to live life to the fullest

We can say with some certainty that today’s consumerist society has convinced us that happiness is a brief and fleeting state which is almost always associated with vice and ownership of certain products. A nice car, a particular brand of phone, certain comforts at home, a specific style of name brand clothes… All of those things give us a disposable happiness, a false sense of well-being that turns us into true addicts.

Maybe it’s better to see things from a different and more logical perspective. Let’s accept once and for all that happiness doesn’t have to be brief nor fleeting. To help us achieve the kind of life that we want, need, and can give us permanent well-being, we need to work hard every day on certain aspects of our life.

Let’s reflect on them.

Keys to Live with passion

• Passionate Purpose. To be happier day to day and to guarantee that our well-being is permanent and satisfactory, we must find the inner passions that define us and give shape to our lives. To that end, we have to make sure that everything we do is satisfying and is in harmony with our values, identity, and personal interests.
• Rational thought. Today we understand that emotions and intuition play an important part in understanding our behavior. Nevertheless, we should understand clearly that in our efforts to be happy we must make rational, firm, and objective decisions. That would mean, for example, distancing ourselves from certain people, leaving a job to start a new project, etc… All of these decisions require logical and rational thought. They also require one more thing: courage.
• Self-discipline. Contrary to popular belief, living life to the fullest requires a certain amount of discipline. Sometimes we have to forget about instant gratification in order to have better long-term results.

In conclusion, living a more meaningful and positive existence requires a strong-will, discipline, and some courage. We all know that sometimes we have to make some serious decisions that will help us fulfill our long-awaited desires.

Daring to do it can open the door to being our true selves for the first time in a long time…