The Fine Line Between Passion & Obsession

We accumulate this wisdom in many ways: from the world around us, and the way our senses perceive things, from the people we interact with, from the media we expose ourselves to, and from the insights we develop from digesting all of that.

Since the advent of the Internet and all the information it is purported to contain, we have added exponentially to the sheer tonnage of input that is available to us.

So much so that you could validly argue that many of us are in a state of sensory overload pretty much all the time. Revelations come at us with such frequency that we sometimes fail to see them for what they are, and just transfer them over to the great repository of data our marvellous brains are capable of storing.

I started thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, when I sat down to write a post and realized that once I started thinking about the thing I wanted to write about, my mind immediately filled up with data, so much so that I had a great deal of trouble trying to focus and determine a starting point for myself.

This is actually the first time that this has happened to me, that I can recall. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me, and trying to think my way through it was extremely fatiguing.

Needless to say I didn’t write anything that day. Instead I went for a bike ride and thought through what had happened.

At first I thought, philosophically, well maybe you are coming to the end of your writing gig and your mind and body have gotten in sync and are trying to send you a message.

But that didn’t really make sense because it fought against everything I believe about writing ie. It’s not a thing that you do, but very much what you are. And I honestly didn’t sense any real finality about the decision to get up from my computer and walk away.

And once I had rejected that, I just let my mind wander for a bit and where it ended up is right here.

I started to see that one of the things that had happened to me, especially over the past decade was that part of my writing had transitioned from being experience-based storytelling into something more in the Crusader Rabbit category.

For me personally this all started back in the last couple years of the Conservative administration of then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, when I started using what little influence I might have had at the time to create posts and memes designed to make people aware that this guy was not good for democracy, and that he had to go.

And that kind of opened the floodgates. Even though I am nowhere near a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, I am very much an anti-conservative, simply because I have seen how the Conservative party in this country (as the US Republicans) appear to be very much a tool of big business and the rich, and are really the conduit for all the imbalance in our society today.

You can agree or disagree with that, I don’t care, because this post is not about politics, it’s about obsession, and the easy lure of it.

And I jumped in with both guns blazing. From Stephen Harper to sleazy Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, to Donald Trump and the US Republicans to now Ontario premier Doug Ford to Harper clone Andrew Scheer.

I had a ball. I was using all the communications skills I had developed over the years to go at these guys big time.

But what I started to notice, and this all culminated a couple of weeks ago, was that I had become obsessed with this crap to the exclusion of almost everything else. And so when I sat down to write a free form piece, determined to not make it political, my mind went nuts.

Now this is not an play for sympathy. It is a true object lesson that all of us can take to heart.

Be driven by your passion.
But stay in the fucking driver’s seat.

Me

It’s great to have passion. But you need to keep an eye on it, because the line between passion and obsession is a very fine one and sometimes you can drift over into obsession and not even know it, as was the case with me.

This piece is an attempt to explain that to you all, as much as it is to clarify this to myself.

I have learned a great lesson and I have to thank by my sister and my wife, who in their own ways have been pointing this out to me for while now.

Well, message received, and while I may very well keep shouting at things I think are wrong, I have clearly seen the line between passion and obsession, and will work hard not to cross it in the future.