Don't Follow Your Passion. Embody It.
Love and Discernment in the Art of Living Beautifully [Newsletter #42]
Hello wonderful people,
Happy Friday, and welcome back to the Wisdom Workshop Newsletter : a selection of quotes, links and invitations to re-imagine a higher education for well-being.
This is issue #42, on harmonious passions, self-love, and hope.
inspired and supported by members of the creative innovation workshop 🧙♂️
💎 5 Quotes I’m Considering
“One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something—your dream, your image of the future.”
― Paul Torrance, creativity researcher
““If you want to become significantly better at anything, you have to fall in love with the process of doing it. You have to fall in love with building the identity of someone who does the work.”
―James Clear, writer of Atomic Habits
“A person cannot love himself except insofar as he loves other things.”
―Harry Frankfurt, philosopher emeritus of philosophy at Princeton
“Only a madman looks for figs in winter.”
―Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
“Purity of the heart is to will one thing.”
―Søren Kierkegaard, existentialist philosopher
🔗 3 Inquiries Worth Sharing
Is this newsletter a product of harmonious or obsessive passion? Does it spring naturally from my love of learning and writing, or is it something I’m chasing after to get something or to be something else? Am I impelled or compelled to make it? Does it promote a sense of joy and love, or lurking anxiety and fear?
Harmonious passions are wholesomely integrated into our lives and identities, into the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Scott Barry Kaufman, like Kierkegaard, advises us: “Don’t follow your passion. Embody it.”
Discerning between harmonious and obsessive passion can lead to healthier interactions with ourselves. From “The psychology of passion: A meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcome:” over 90 studies suggest that “harmonious passion positively corresponded with positive intrapersonal outcomes (e.g., positive affect, flow, performance).”
Presuming that I care about positive affect, flow, and performance, how might I approach my creativity as a mode of caring self-love?
For the philosophically-inclined, I’m digging Harry G. Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love for what it tells us about self-improvement and creative passion. “Frankfurt argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love.”
This “wholeheartedness” sounds a lot like harmonious passion, especially as he links this to a self-love that wants nothing in return — something that we love doing for its own sake.
Can I harness hope to be more creative? Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire end their Wired to Create chapter on Passion with Charles Snyder’s Hope Theory. Snyder argues that hope requires both will and ways to make our (passionate) dreams a reality. For Snyder, hope is a “dynamic motivational system” that includes goals (short-term or long-term; more specific and challenging the better) and pathways (internal strengths and resources and/or external social support or resources).
For a current positive psychology and systems thinking on the subject, check out “A New Hope” for Positive Psychology: A Dynamic Systems Reconceptualization of Hope Theory” in a 2022 edition of Frontiers of Psychology. The authors suggest a more nuanced idea of “resourcing” for university students. Their ideas of “WhyPower” (internal resources) and “WePower” (of interpersonal resources) seem relevant to nourishing ourselves and each other’s creativity.
Which, if any, of these ideas are speaking to you? How do they connect to your work? Reply to this email or
✍ Writing to Reflect
I’ve always seen my journaling practice as a mode of self-love.
When I lead writing workshops, I ask participants to come with a nice beverage, a cozy blanket, or anything else that sends signals : “I’m taking care of myself for the next twenty minutes.”
But writing this newsletter has me thinking: it’s not just caring for ourselves that makes this work: it’s also caring about care itself. Not only as a way of deepening our engagements with what and who we love, but even more basically, a way of savoring our ability to love at all.
This squares with Frankfurt’s assertion that “the most elementary for of self-love is nothing more than the desire of a person to love.” And, further, “insofar as this is true, self-love is simply a commitment to finding meaning in our lives.”
I continue writing for myself because of how it feels to keep writing. It’s a harmonious passion, a meaningful one that still nurtures the wills and ways of hope most days. I’m now 195 pocket journals and over 2 million words into the practice.
If I show up to the page, honest and curious of what might come up, I hope I will feel better. And I hope to get into flow and improve performance. And I nearly always do.
And as I continue to love, to hope this practice encourages us to cultivate more harmonious, wholehearted passions for whatever it is we’re creating. For parenting, curating, researching, music-making, and living as well as we can.
Which reminds me of Epictetus:
"Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it"
Some writing invitations:
✍️ Where’s your heart right now?
✍️ What do you love?
✍️ What are your inner and outer resources to stay on the path?
✍️ How can you be more wholehearted in your creativity?
🎉 Now Enrolling
Want to join the waitlist for the next Wisdom Workshop?
Just reply to this email and I’ll send you some cool writing invitations. No pressure or obligation to commit.
We’re offering a cohort-based course in not-self authorship and mindful freewriting called Writing the Good Life, and a cohort-based course nourishing creativity called the Art of Living Beautifully. Starting dates/times TBD based on waitlist.
🎵 If you’re in Fort Collins, Colorado - Playing a show later this month
Saturday, March 25 at the Forge Publick House | 21+ | 8-10pm
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✌ Thanks for Reading
and thanks for the good email conversations,
Sean