At some point in our lives, artists (any type) face this crossroad where we must choose between following our passion vs. our ambition. I think this choice is a pivotal one in every human’s story. It is a defining moment. It defines not only the individual’s future, but it also defines humanity’s future.
Most of us don’t even realize that we face this choice but we do. Passion and ambition have been confused as one and the same, but they are not the same. Imagine walking deep down in a dense forest and you reach a crossraods but the denseness of the forest hides the fact that there was a different path choice available. This is how I see the two choices.
Passion is the path that is hidden from our view. We mistake passion and ambition as the same and don’t even realize that we made the choice between the two. It is not that we can’t have both, but one does have to be chosen over the other when the choice is given.
We see many people following their ambition and we say it is passion. It is not passion. I think that real passion requires us to sacrifice ambition. Otherwise, it will not embrace us at the end. We will create but what we create will be commercial. It will lack soul. It is like procreating humans without souls. They are alive but dead on the inside.
We can create and there is nothing stopping us from creating, but what we are creating is soulless. Soul comes from passion. This is why the soul connection is important in all of our relationships…even with things.
In order to have passion’s blessing, we must forsake ambition. Ambition is for others; we want to prove some thing to “others” and to ourselves. It’s focussed on achieving and showing it off. We wouldn’t pursue it if no one was going to ever know about it.
Passion is like this magnificient presence to whom even ambition bows down to. When we walk on the path of passion, ambition becomes akin to a heave baggage. This baggage gets heavier and heavier as we walk towards passion. We don’t trust that our passion has whatever we will need so we grab on to ambition and let go of passion. We create but it has no depth.
Passion is what I see in the works of artists (all types, including scientists and mystics) from back in the days. Their work is classic. It cannot die. It has soul. They didn’t create. Instead, they meditated and allowed the creation to be birthed through them. They themselves had to step out of the way. That meant that they had to get their desire to “be somebody” out of the way. They had to become a “nobody”.
Beyond the Anxious Mind 