Pleasure or Passion?

I was having my hair cut not too long ago, and there on the mirror in front of me with a sticker that announced,, “If something isn’t fun, then why do it?” I was tempted to ask the barber if working with my greasy hair was fun for him. But I resisted. The sticker, though, did have a point. Why do something if we’re not passionate about it?

Ah ha! There’s a significant word: passion. This is where the argument touched on in may last blog, begins to reveal its cracks – around the word passion.

On the surface, all of the catch phrases I highlighted in my previous blog seem to call us to a life of fun. But we’d be missing the true sparkle behind these charms if we settled for a casual glance. Indeed, if we put our eyeglass to the test, we’ll discover a quest for passion. Pleasure may be one of the suggested chisels we need to dig out the pearls of passion, but it’s passion that is at the core of these worldly philosophies. In other words, they are saying, “Be passionate about life.”

But what life? Your life? Someone else’s life? All of life? Any life? A bad life? And with what kind of passion? There’s a lot of passion around – a lot of people are hungry for life. And they eat as  much of it as they can. But are they left satisfied? Are they ever really ‘full’? Reminds me of a proverb.

“The righteous eat to their hearts' content, but the stomach of the wicked goes hungry” (Proverbs 13:25).