A number of people sent me a link to a New York Times story earlier this week about Lady Gaga And The Life Of Passion. When five or six people send me the same link and say they feel it would be of interest to me, I tend to pay attention to it, they are seeing something in someone else’s ideas that they see in me.
The piece was about a tribute to Lada Gaga who was receiving an award from a group called Americans For The Arts and she was being celebrated as a person of passion living a life of passion. She told the group she always wanted to be a constant reminder to the universe of what passion looks like. What it sounds like and feels like.
The writer of the piece, David Brooks, wrote elegantly that he supposed that “people who live with passion start out with an especially intense desire to complete themselves. We are the only animals who are naturally unfinished. Who have to bring ourselves to fulfillment, to integration, and to coherence.”
They construct themselves inwardly, he wrote, by expressing themselves outwardly. A life of passion happens when an emotional nature meets a consuming vocation. People of passion have high levels both of vulnerability and courage.
Brooks said something else of importance, I thought: “To be passionate is to put yourself in danger.” It asks us to defy the very nature of life and belief all around us. Living with this danger requires a courage that takes two forms. First, people with passion must have the courage to dig down and explore and expose the issues and struggles that shape their lives. Secondly, people with passion have the courage to be themselves with abandon. To be authentic.
We all have a theory of ourselves, many of us are taught by a society that celebrates conformity and safety, not individuality and risk. We are told from our very first day in school that our theories are neither important nor interesting. Our system of politics does not care much what we think and believe, a source of so much rage for so many.
From the pilgrims in Salem to CEO’s In New York to the blockheads in Congress, we are warned again and again not to stray too far from convention, it is bad for the system. It can cost you your head. The world, we are told, is ruled by a left and a right, and if you choose another path, there is nowhere for you to walk, no one to listen.
Maria and I seek a life of passion. Our emotional natures have met work that we love. We are constructed inwardly to express ourselves outwardly.
I have written more than one best-selling book and it was almost always a shock to me that anyone outside of my own small circle would be much interested in what I do or believe. Every book I write, every blog post, every photograph puts me in danger, I chose to expose myself to a wide and sometimes unfriendly world. For someone with my troubles, that is almost the definition of vulnerability. But the irony is that I have never felt safer.
There is great reward as well as risk in a life of passion. I try to draw the courage to be myself, to live in my skin, to fend off the anger, judgments and challenges of the wider world. Being authentic is the safest place for me, because if you are honest about your life, your fears, your flaws, then you need not ever fear exposure or discovery. If there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear, there is nothing to find. There is almost nothing anyone could say about me that I haven’t said first, and often.
I was once a child of many secrets, I am now a man of none. What you see here is what there is, God help us all.
People tell me I am too hard on myself, but perhaps there is some calculated security in being one’s own toughest critic. You can beat all the others to the punch. Unlike so many people, I do believe in the subconscious, sometimes I feel like a deepwater submarine, trawling the depths of my soul.
Sharing my life and work on the blog has given me the greatest strength and grounding I have ever had. I might fear many things, but I do not have to fear the tyranny of the mob, of other people’s opinions. I stand or fall on my own. The worst is passed, I think, I am no longer trying to walk in a whirlwind. I am beginning to understand my own skin and living in it.
At the awards ceremony, Lady Gaga was praised for being her own unique self, she acknowledges her own contradictions and throws them before the world. She makes herself the work of art. Our culture lives in fear and faux obligations – we must make so much money in order to have so many things, smother our passions or hide them from the world. Many scramble to acquire a shallow notion of security that they don’t need or ultimately don’t even want. One of the many lessons of my hospice work comes from encountering so many people who have dedicated their entire lives to ending up in a place and a life they never meant to be and don’t want.
They gave up a life of passion for fear. Do not, ever, I am reminded again and again, live a life centered on making enough to achieve an existencedictated by people who wish to profit from it.
A life of passion is not ever a life of fear. This is the very question I asked myself a few years ago, when I felt my life was spiraling out of control and into a dark well with no way out. I asked myself what might I be and what might I do if I weren’t so afraid?
And I have been doing it ever since.