Thinking About Passion…

Over and over I have to reinforce what I am passionate about in my life and hold onto those things…not let the outside things in.  Like the thoughts about money or impatience or frustrations with people.   It’s like when my house becomes a mess, I need to put all the things back in the closest to clear my mind.

Relationships are like this.  They take maintenance.  If you don’t show and share your passion with the other person often then you are certain to lose that person.  And if they don’t physically leave you then they have probably mentally or emotionally lost you in some way.  It’s just inevitable.  Who wants to be with someone who rarely shows themselves to you.

The love is dormant if you aren’t giving it.  Dormant may be too polite…because all together it just feels dead.   So many times in my life, I think I have had this idea that just because there is “love”, then the relationship should just operate off this word.  And that’s all it is…a word.  Some concept that has been made into this thing love that just sits around at your house watching TV or working on the computer.  But is that what love is?  The statement “I love you.” implies that love is a verb so doesn’t that mean that an action is involved from love?  To express itself?  To show itself?  To communicate a lot and have fun with you?  Isn’t that what attracts us to each other?

It’s like calling myself an “artist”, but never doing any art.

People say the passion fades the longer you are with someone.   Is this true or is this just what we tell ourselves?  Could it be that we just put all of our energy into the beginning of the relationship and then all the other real life shit hits us and then we become lazy and complacent towards the other person?  Do we lose passion for the other things we love in life?  Wouldn’t that mean that all passion would then fade?  Or…does it just take a little perspective to look at the importance we give to our relationships compared to the importance we give other things.  You would think that love over work would rule.  But then why do we continue the passion for work and not for the people we supposedly love?

Thinking about this reminds me that I want to give the most importance to only the things I love doing and the people that I love most in my life and to honor and protect them every day.  Maybe those things are few, but they are enough.   I love my friends and I love my family.  I love to communicate with people and I love to travel.  I’m discovering that I love to write and that I love to paint for people.  On Saturdays I volunteer for a community in the South of Santiago to teach English and play games with the kids.  The community is one of the more financially poor neighborhoods in Santiago.  I’m excited about painting a mural for their neighborhood.  One of the older girls gave me the biggest hug last week out of nowhere.  So much love.   Life is too short to live for anything more.

Working Again!

Someone found my name last night on an expat site and asked me about life in Santiago… how it feels to be away from friends, family etc…

I don’t really think I was ready to fully comment on that other than my basic impressions of people, food, city life etc… What she really wanted to know was about being away from the familiar and she wanted the assurance that she could find the familiar or at least some of it here.

I guess it’s a little easier for me (the family part) because I haven’t lived near them in 13 years.  And the friends…it’s a little harder.  But, I always feel like I am quick to make friends (or acquaintances) wherever I go.

How hard it is to stay in the moment here in Santiago and not have my mind wondering back to life in the US.   I have to tell myself:  You are here now and take the time to do the daily things that equal living here.

At the same time, I love life here and maybe not because of Santiago itself, but I love the fact that I’m consciously creating what’s happening in my life right now.  I started doing that back in Long Beach.   Coming here was my decision whether it works out or not and I’m really enjoying that.  I was raised to believe that life is planned out for you based on the decisions you make when you are 18.  There’s one shot at college.  And if you chose, like I did to go to art school, then you better find a real job after that  and you better stay on it…or get something else and hold on to it and don’t let go because if you do then how will that look moving from job to job?   Especially when the economy crashes!  Then panic and take anything you can get.   I spent about a half a year on unemployment and sent my resume out to places I didn’t want to work and thank god I never got any responses to the 20 resumes I sent out each day.  I could be stuck in some office somewhere once again making sure files are in order and listening to soft radio all day trying to stay awake with my third weak office coffee.  I don’t mean to make light of this because the economy has been rough for so many people, but it was actually one of the best things that happened to me.  It forced me to get creative and change my attitude.  Not to mention, it also gave me so much time to just take care of myself in a way I had never done before.  When I was laid off, I considered everything I could possible do to make some kind of change in my life.  I got really serious about my art, painted more, participated in as many shows as I could, whether I sold anything or not, at least I was doing something.  I took whatever side work I could do and tried to hold off from committing myself to something unless I really had a good feeling about it.  Kind of hard for me to defend how I wanted to have a “good feeling” before accepting my next job in an economy that barely had jobs available.  But it didn’t matter for a long time because I was still “ doing my duty”  by sending out the resumes until one day 6 months into unemployment I finally got an offer from an office as an administrative assistant.   It paid very well.  It was a long commute down to an office park.  The office had only one 60 year old woman employee and the owners were a wealthy family of investors.  I would be going through all of their files to keep everything updated and process paperwork for their properties.  I couldn’t  imagine  myself in there all day.  Three days after taking the job, I quit.  That was a hard decision to make, but I felt like I was already on a path and that job just didn’t fit into it.  Something I never considered before was that I didn’t have to accept whatever came along in my life…bad economy or good economy.  The nature of my life was the important thing and I could choose what was going to compliment it.  (and yes, I do thank the universe  everyday to even be in a position to make a statement like that).  Of course after that, I lost my unemployment and lived off my tax return and a few side jobs (including things like cleaning out someone’s storage space, weeding someone’s garden…)  for the next several months.  That was difficult.  It can feel very low to not be working in the same way as mostly everyone around you.    I didn’t have much of a social life because I couldn’t afford to go out anywhere, but that’s the price I paid.   But, I still loved my life so much more because I wasn’t doing something I hated.  And, somehow I still paid my rent each month.  It was one of the only things I could keep paying each month.  Meanwhile, I got my TESOL certificate to teach English abroad, volunteered to get experience and then finally started to get paying teaching gigs until eventually I was working several teaching jobs that equaled full time.  I always wanted to travel and this was the way I knew I could do it….so here I am.  No regrets.

I start my new job here next Monday.  I spent the day yesterday doing a full demo class for my new boss and it went very well.  (What a good actress I was:)   I’m going to be teaching small groups of business people at their companies along with some private students.  Excited to finally, begin working again!