Passion
or Obsession
“It is
surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.”
Robert Bly
Obsessions run the gamut
from mere infatuation to mania and compulsion. Between what is minor
and what is pathological are way-stations such as fixation, passion
and preoccupation. We sometimes diagnose obsessions as unhealthy,
especially when they get in the way of everyday life, but certainly,
new love is obsessive and no one wants to ditch that. All human
beings have what the autism community refers to as “a restricted
interest,” and some of those are productive and some are not—which
seems to be the demarcation point between being deemed healthy or
pathological. Many people have turned something that started out as
an obsession into an industry. Obsessive behavior pushes us to
perfect, collect, and refine and can make us “the best” at
whatever we do. I think of elite athletes who practice their sport
six or eight hours a day, even when their game is not in season, and
no coach is pushing them to keep up their skills. It can also ruin our lives.
A pathological obsession
is “an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on
a person's mind.” (Webster's) It can motivate us to create, as it did Vincent
van Gogh, or it can render us insane by interfering with sleep and
driving us to mania. On the other hand, passionate interest in one
thing has produced some of our greatest inventions and discoveries.
Think Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, Marie Curie, and Watson
and Crick, all of whom devoted their lives to a single concept.
It seems uniquely human
to have passion for something. When we don't have a consuming
interest in life, we feel flat and distracted. We can fritter away
our days in idleness or aimlessness. Passionate interest is an
exercise of life energy, of directed chi. It is life asserting itself
and directing itself. But there is a difference between passion for
something and all-consuming obsession with something—one enhances
life, and one interferes with it. As with most things, between the
black and the white are many shades of gray. Do you have a driving
obsession? How does it affect your life?
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment