GERARD FOURNIER
What we want to hear, quite simply, is that there is more to life than what our age generally offers us. That there is a way to better ourselves, and by extension, our world. “All right,” we may conclude after trying a rainbow of quick-fix snake-oil solutions; “So it won’t happen overnight.” We can live with that. “But it will happen, right? I mean, I’m not just kidding myself, about this greater purpose in life, and my greater role to play? So what do I have to do, and where do I start?”
THOMAS MOORE
Well if a person's been sitting on their passion for a long time, maybe maintaining the corporate personality or the professional persona, something like that, and then they decide they really want to have more passion in life, or maybe it will start breaking out of them, well that person has, I'm afraid there's no other choice, but to go through a radical change in life.
I mean you have to adjust life to the passion rather than the other way around. The process has got to be reversed. So one has to live in such a way that you have an environment where you can be passionate. You have to be to be passionate at home, and maybe people either have to adjust or you have to get away for awhile or something. You have to be passionate at work and do something where your passions are engaged.
That means quite a big shift in the way you imagine your life. What's going to give you the sense of meaning. What is going to give you the money you think you need to get along. All of those things have to be worked out. Now if I say something like that, a person might immediately say, “Well, I can't do that, that's asking too much.” And I understand that. But I think that we have to give ourselves time. It takes time to find the work that will allow us to be passionate. And it might take some time to work things out in a family and in a marriage so that that happens as well. So I don't think you can make that shift overnight. It's got to be something that you have to keep attending to, and sometimes over a long period.
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