Pogue,

So here’s a thing. I came across somebody this week, a lady, who trains hard. She lifts weights and doing one particular lift she was using 60kgs as her max. But this week she became impassioned, in the zone, and pushed through 60kgs and kept going until she maxed out at 100kgs (too a loud cheer).

What gave her the uplift?

I wrote that poem last week and you thought someone else had written it and I had just posted it. Where did I suddenly find the thoughts, feelings and words to create the poem?

The answer is in a deep place in a focused moment. I confess I felt sad, overwhelmingly sad about something and I was totally in the moment experiencing my feeling. And there were the words waiting to be brought out. I’m guessing my lady friend connected with something deep inside that was waiting to be let out, unrealised potential, and she was really there in the moment, focused by a particular emotion (I know she had felt angry during the week).

I’m going to suggest we all have a well of unrealised potential that just needs to be connected with. I make it sound easy but the fact so few people produce anything outstanding suggests its not. Anger becomes violence, sadness builds to depression and is repeated over and over. Finding a better expression of those inner feelings can be very cathartic and is a real way to give them form in a constructive way. Then we need to release them. Give voice to them, express them.

It involves acknowledging their existence and owning them. Being mindful and feeling them but also standing off and observing yourself. Then you need to be able to release them, but in a healthy constructive way. Writing, exercise, art, whatever, but not in a knee jerk act where they are unleashed in an explosion or a regrettable action. However you deal with those feelings, once let out, there’s no way back and sometimes the damage done can never be rectified. As I say, yes I may forgive you but, no, I will never forget, and that memory will temper my behaviour going forward.

There, unrealised potential, reached in moments of intense feelings, be it anger and sadness or joy and peace. Maybe there is learning to be had on how to focus those feelings rather than letting them just drift away as our mood changes.

Maybe.

But in all deep moments, moments we might call passion, there is a well of potential which, having realised once, lays open the future to drawing more from the same well.

Yours, looking for a little passion,

Wic