2022 February 22: Discover and Nurture your Life Passion

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Last week, we talked about life choices and truly setting our own goals, and living a life guided by our passions. Tonight, we’re going to talk a little bit more about our goals and how to recognize and nurture our life passion. I think it’s a really important topic.

First, in context, this is being recorded the evening of February 23rd, 2022. I woke up this morning to learn that Putin had directed Russian troops to begin invading the Ukraine territory. Just think about that for a moment. Imagine if Mexico were much larger and tremendously more powerful than the US, and you woke up to find out that they were invading Texas and Southern California because they felt they were wrongfully taken many decades ago. 

The Wall Street Journal has been doing a really good job of putting faces on this hard aggression, showing how people’s homes have been shelled and mortared, how people have had to flee and leave everything. They get away from the area where the invasion is starting. Now, imagine yourself in such a situation. Think about what would really matter to you. Would it be football scores? Is your new car new enough? Is my own iPhone too old to use because I got it last year? I’m not happy because my hair is gray. I think we can all agree that in such circumstances, we’d be focusing, obsessing, totally driven by caring after other people and things that are precious to us. We would probably be thinking in terms of what to do next, how to maximize the next moments of our lives, and the lives of everyone all around us.

You know, for most of us, in most cases, we have the luxury of living a reasonably comfortable life. Why do we fritter away our energy on the unimportant things in life? Life may not be perfect, may not be ideal. We could think of things that are better, but it’s generally safe, under control. But because we forget or get distracted from nurturing and living towards our own true passions, we lose sight of what’s really important. 

Someone I follow occasionally, her name is Sammy Marie Grimm. Sammy summed it up as this: life passion is a form of self-care. Think about that for a minute. Life passion, or just passion, is a form of self-care. Sam is a young woman that has a YouTube channel and also some multiple multimedia channels, and she’s made her passion helping others who suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, which is something that she also is afflicted by. 

It’s an illness of interest to me, and it’s often stigmatized and misunderstood. The sufferers often feel completely isolated and hopeless. If you read the literature on this subject, it ranges from a bad prognosis to a horrible prognosis. It’s not a fun thing to be involved with in any way. So, Sammy, who is recovering from multiple misdiagnosis and has Borderline Personality Disorder, decided that the best way she could help others was to speak openly and supportively to help other people in that same situation, to give them hope, to see how somebody can face it head on and make progress in it. And you might say, okay, that’s nice, but what that, what has that got to do with anything? 

The magic in that statement is in her approach, and that applies to all of us, and it’s that by recognizing, nurturing, and living her passion, and her passion was helping others, that she’s not only caring for other people, but she’s healing herself and helping herself live a life filled with purpose and gratitude, and that’s really important. So, now think of Sammy and the people in the path of the ongoing invasion in the Ukraine territory by Russia and what do they have in common? 

Both of them by circumstance, were forced to absolutely focus on what really matters in life, right? There is no room for distraction. They had no other alternatives. So, let’s just think for a second about our own lives. Are we really focused on our passion? Are we even sure what our passion is? If we think of what our passion is, when was the last time we even checked in on it? You know, just kind of stopped by, had a little chat with it, said, hey, how’s it going? How am I doing? Are we kind of getting closer? You know, am I really paying attention to you? When’s the last time you evaluated where you were in life, and where you are in relation to where you wanted to go? Because it's one thing to look at where we are and say, oh, you know, things aren’t too bad but then, when you look at what your dreams used to be, then, it takes on a whole different perspective. 

The Peru tourism board had a really neat little segment encouraging travel to Peru. It was a high power business person and he’s all wrapped up in high-powered things and he gets this little envelope in the mail. It was a recording he made 20 years earlier on his trip in Peru. I won’t give away the whole thing, but it was interesting. I’ve done this - I think I mentioned it before. I’ve done this for shorter time periods like for two years, where I write myself a letter and have somebody else hold it, mail it to me in two years, then check in and see. So, here’s where I thought it would be in two years. How did I do? It’s really very enlightening. 

If we don’t check in on ourselves, who’s going to do it for us? Because no one can really know what we want, what our passion really is, like we do ourselves, and if we want to inspire others, we have to be inspired ourselves. If we want to improve the world, we have to be willing to improve ourselves. No matter what we want to accomplish, the best way to do it is by example. Even something as extensively self-serving as I want to be wealthier - the best way to attain that is by sharing our wealth and teaching others because that attitude will tend to attract other like-minded individuals, and you’ll find not only material wealth but also the wealth of friendship and the spiritual and emotional wealth of contentment. Even the simplest of things when we share them with others, we find out that we get back not only the things that we’re trying to attain, but so much more beyond that.

From last week, you can remember we talked about how we can imagine what we can do with the future, or we can actually make a conscious decision right now, to start making the future - the one that we want to live. It’s one thing to think about what we want to do. It’s another thing to act upon it, and acting upon it is what will bring us to reaching our goals and fulfilling our passion..

Also, last week we talked about how we can define our life in terms of fear of the unknown and living comfortably, but that’s kind of without passion. Passion almost by definition has some risk associated with it. We have to step a little bit outside our comfort zone to really do what’s important to us. So we can define our lives instead in terms of personal satisfaction, or spiritual and emotional wealth instead of monetary wealth. 

Monetary wealth is pretty easy, right? You can define where you want to be and then you’ll automatically kind of live to whatever level that is and you can say, well, I just want to live comfortably and you’ll live comfortably. All of society is set up to focus us on monetary wealth, but if we really want to live our passion, that usually goes way beyond just getting some money together or getting a new car. That’s really making life changes in ourselves and in the people around us. 

That’s really a lot harder to attain, and that takes a lot more focus and purpose. The best way to get focus is to define what your passion really is. Once you do that, once you rediscover your passion, then you’ll find out that you can make every decision so that every step we take is leading us toward that place that we really want to go, instead of just wandering around and entertaining ourselves with whatever’s on TV tonight. We can really live to where we want to get to. 

Remember, don’t be put off by the obstacles, because they’re always going to be there. Most of them are actually created by our minds to try and keep us safe from what we perceive as a risk. Most certainly, don’t be put off by the criticism of others, because they’re just taking and echoing what society has already told them. It’s like oh, we know that person. They’re weird. They drive an old car, but they spend all their time teaching kids. 

They’re missing the whole point, that the person who lives that way probably is living a very fulfilling life and living towards their passion. There’s nothing stopping you from reconnecting with your passion. We are refining it and visiting it every single day, and envisioning it. Once you start to envision it, you’ll find that it guides every decision and living your life in a way that really brings you to fulfillment and contentment. 

It’s a simple concept, but it’s really easy to get distracted and lost in the shuffle of everyday living. I do this. I talk to people about this every day, and still it happens to me. You get all wrapped up in all the little minutiae of life, and it pays to set some time aside every single day. I have a slip of paper on the wall with some motivating ideas and goals that I go through and I review every day. It’s interesting, because if you skip it for a couple of days, and you go back to it, you realize you didn’t say that the past couple days and I kind of let that slip away from my consciousness. 

So passion is something that although it’s inside you and has to burn deeply inside you, you still have to bring it to the forefront of your own mind, because a lot of things going on in the world that want to kind of distract you from that all the time. 

One last thing: please keep everyone involved in this needless Russian-led conflict in your prayers and in your good thoughts, not only just the Ukrainian people, but everyone who is in harm’s way, because it really has worldwide implications. This isn’t about one country just going around and inflicting pain on their neighbor. This has worldwide implications and far more countries are looking at this and probably will become involved if it’s not stopped. So, now is a good time to really think positive thoughts about that, and to try and keep everyone in your thoughts and prayers, please. 

That’s it for the week. Passion leads the way. Thanks for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you’d like to hear. Have a great week and thanks for visiting Of course, remember to live the life that you dreamed of because that’s the path to contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone.