Carl Bernstein was a teenage copy boy at The Washington Star when he was assigned to attend President John F. Kennedy's inaugural parade and supply "color" details for the newspaper's coverage of the event. With snow and freezing temperatures on the menu, Bernstein made sure to scout the parade route for the best vantage points. He thought through the potential challenges of getting from his home in Maryland to the parade on time the next day, and decided to camp out with his grandparents, who lived closer.
Then, the next day, this kid, who was an unenthusiastic student and occasional truant, made sure to show up on time and do his job for the Star like one of the pros.
Bernstein relates that experience in his engaging new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom. As a former journalist who entered the field while newspapering was still slightly aglow from the memory of the glory of Watergate, I have loved tagging along on Bernstein's trip back into an old-style newsroom. More than the nostalgia, however, I feel drawn to Bernstein's descriptions of the passion he almost instantly felt when he stepped into the Star newsroom. It seems nothing short of magical.
Passion is so mysterious. Every so often, we're lucky enough to trip into an intellectual or creative pursuit and find ourselves unexpectedly consumed and ready to do that thing whenever possible. Sometimes it even becomes an obsession. I have lived a few years now, some of which were devoid of passion and many that have been filled to the brim with it, and I am still transfixed by the mystery of what makes certain people, places and activities exponentially more magnetic to us than others.
How, exactly, do these things take root and grow? Can you set out with purpose to find a passion or must it find you? Can you live a happy life if you don't have something that lights you up inside and takes you out of your own skin?
A while ago, I put a question about it on Facebook, and people were eager to write about the things they love to do. As you might expect, creativity made a fine showing. Many people get into the zone when they paint, write, sew, cook, stitch. My friend Ellen says she experiences an endorphin rush whenever she's about to start a new knitting project. My illustrator friend Jackie describes being swept away by the opera at age 12.
Many people profess a passion for music, and it was heartening to read that some are especially drawn to choral music. What they can't get enough of is, specifically, being part of the experience of many voices becoming one.
A few people identified their hobbies in a way that made me unsure these all were true passions, which I roughly define as "things for which we will eagerly forfeit sleep." But of course not all pleasurable endeavors own us the way a true passion does. Is the concept of "pastime" still a thing? Are there people who take up, say, golf simply to occupy hours not spent working?
Of special interest to me were comments from those who either hadn't yet found a passion or who had so many interests that they couldn't focus on a single thing. These experiences are common and, if memory serves, pretty distressing. As I mentioned on the Facebook thread, during my teen years, I witnessed my cousin's passion for horses and knew I wanted what she had. She took riding lessons, collected Breyer toy horses, and eventually got a horse of her own. I can still cringe at the memory of telling her, "You'll make me a horse nut yet!" — not because being a "horse nut" is terrible, but because the statement reeked of weird, desperate envy.
It is uncomfortable to want a passionate life -- to know that the possibility exists for a delicious relationship with a consuming endeavor, and yet not have that in our life.
So how do we get it?
Luck almost certainly plays a part, but we can help luck along, can't we? We can adopt the right attitude, I think, and make choices that invite the gods of passion to show face once in a while.
And, God help us, as in finding passionate romance, I think we need to try, yet not try too hard. Yearning is OK, but desperate yearning gets in the way. We need to look without staring. Or, in the immortal words of .38 Special, hold on loosely but don't let go.
Maybe we notice something that lights up our brains and hearts, so we give it a go. Lightly. If it catches our interest, we give it a little more. We do that for a while, long enough to let something small take root. Long enough to get past the honeymoon stage and have our first fight, because anything worth doing will inevitably become harder to do as we get into it and there will come a time when we think we hate it. That's when we know the chemistry is there. A little anger or frustration — my drawings look like they were made by drunk wombats — are not enough to keep us from returning to something that has sunk roots in our souls.
And if the chemistry isn't there, no sweat. Cut it loose. Sometimes the value of trying Italian or counted cross-stitch or even hunting (yikes!) is that we learn a bit about what we don't like. Fine. Mission accomplished. Something better awaits, we just have to look around again.
By the way, I believe it's also fine not to fret about any of this EVER, but especially if you are in the midst of raising young kids or battling illness.
Passion, like everything else, has its seasons, but it is content to wait on the sidelines while we are in the thick of something. It is neither predictable about its visits nor tethered to youth. It is willing to surprise us after we think we are no longer surprisable.
One of my favorite kinds of stories is Human Finds Love in Old Age. Who can resist two lonely widowed people who charge into a wild December romance? Who can turn away from the woman who starts deadlifting decades after menopause, or the nonagenarian who endeavors to climb 120 steps in his garden every day to raise money for charity, or even the former president who takes up portrait painting in his 60s?
We need not be all in all the time on everything (quite the contrary), but life feels wide open when we wake up eager to grab onto something beyond that first a cup of joe. Our hearts and minds deserve a thrill, don't you think?
For many of us, it is too late to start a youthful romance with a career, as Carl Bernstein did back in the Kennedy era. But I am almost certain that it's never too late to find a passion, or to be found by one — however it works. This is why we must keep digging in, diving deep and grooving on.