Passionlessness

I am fighting with a bout of passionlessness this week.

About everything: work, home, family, relationships, activities, just life in general.

Let me clear: it is not depression - or at least, not directly. It's a sense of doing things - anything- and taking no pleasure about it.

It is what drives mid life crises, I thing: a combination of realizing that the payoff to almost everything we do in our day is much less than we thought it would be, a knowledge that the things that we believed when younger which we would have turned to to stave off these feelings will not change things significantly as we used to believe they would, but the desire to feel about the things in our life the way we used to.

I am realizing that I want to be passionate in my life. I want passion: raw, throbbing passion. I want to be excited about life, not simply existing in it from day to day. I want to be enthused, to be touched in the deep core of my being instead of just exist from day to day on the outskirts of myself, going through the motions of daily living .

It's as if I feel like I am disconnected from my own emotions, that they have gone into some big void in my center and have not come out, replaced by the ability to get through each day - maybe even a defense mechanism created by these same emotions to deal with the fact that they lament where I am in my life now.

But passion is not emotion. I can still experience emotion - more often anger or depression than anything else these days - without any greater sense of being passionate after the fact. In some ways it almost feels like an semi-automated response.

But it's a fair statement to say I have no desire to go on this way. It's like digging through the rind of an orange which only seems to continue to get thicker every day without getting to the fruit.

Again, I think it is was drives the middle age crisis - especially for men: that grasping after something, maybe indefinable for them, that they felt the experienced once but can no longer feel, and the desperation to do anything - anything!-to find that passion once again.