Following Your Passion Is the Most Generous Gift You Give the World

I’m a firm believer that when we follow our passion and desire, it is the most selfless thing we can do for the world. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, wait a minute, if I were to actually follow my passion for making sand sculptures of cute dogs on the beach, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family or live in a home, and how are these sculptures of cute dogs helping anyone?! I invite you to thank that inner critic and let them take a back seat for a few.

Here's what I’ve found to be true: when we follow our passion, we light ourselves up – we’re happier. And it takes so much less energy to exist as a happy person than it does as an unsatisfied, repressed, squished-down version of ourselves. We’re born with desire; it’s the incredible gift from our fiery soul; it’s the guiding light that helps us figure out what we’re doing here. We can choose to answer this little call with joy and gratitude, or not. Sometimes we feel like our desire is inconvenient; once we tune in and really feel it, we may discover that to pursue it, we’d have to change the work that we’re doing or leave the partner we’re with or move away from what is comfortable and familiar. Following our desire is often an undertaking that demands great courage. I think that’s the point.

When I finally started listening to desire, my life transformed rather dramatically. In the span of a year, I went from being married, working as a full-time pharmacist at a prestigious health system, and living in a house with my husband, to being divorced, working per diem as a pharmacist while pursuing my passion work, and living with my parents. You might think this sounds like an odd trade, but the truth is, I have never felt so free. A year and a half ago, I didn’t feel like I was actually helping people in my job, I didn’t feel like I could be my true self with my husband, and I didn’t enjoy spending time on maintaining the beautiful, but understandably needy, home I lived in.

The changes I describe didn’t happen all at once – the Universe isn’t so cruel that it throws more at us than we can handle – but it did all happen, and now I am in this extraordinary moment where I get to build the life that lights me up and follow my passion and desire, which happens to be helping other people find and embody their own passion and desire.

You might be asking yourself, how is any of this selfless? It sounds like you just did what you wanted and said to hell with everyone else. Here’s the thing – when I left my job, they filled it with someone who wanted it more and would infuse their work with joy and gratitude that I just couldn’t, when I left my husband, he became free to find a partner who wanted the same life that he did and who would appreciate him for his many gifts in ways that I couldn’t, and leaving my house opened up the possibility for my ex-husband to bring in a partner who really wanted to care for a home with him in a way that I just couldn’t. For me to try to bend and fold myself into someone who wanted that life was always going to cost me, and I was always going to come up short for everyone around me. I had already been feeling like an energetic vacuum, sucking precious energy away from the people I cared about in the form of my short fuse, impatience, and need to control everything. When we aren’t living in alignment with our passion, it’s not just us suffering; it’s everyone.

Now that I am leaning in to my desire, doing work that feels fulfilling, and finding places where my gifts and energy are most welcome, I have so much more to give. I can be generous with my time, spending it talking to friends about their gorgeous dreams, giving my dog the freedom and play that she deserves, supporting other people taking similar risks to live their most aligned lives, and writing things that I hope will bring others comfort. I show up differently in the world. I have more energy to care for others. I love bigger and deeper. I don’t feel like a drain on people’s batteries all the time anymore; in fact, sometimes I feel like a charger.

If you’re still feeling a little skeptical about the selflessness of pursuing your passion, let me give you a more concrete example. The other day, I was preparing to go running, and it was cold out, so I wore my down puffer coat. I don’t enjoy being cold, and I find I am often cold. It seems to be a story I tell people I meet and myself: “Hi I’m Emily and I run cold. No really, I can never be too warm! Give me all the blankets and sweaters and crank up the heat.”

Five minutes into the run, I was hot…and uncomfortable. I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. In that moment, it dawned on me – I can warm myself up at any time! I know how to generate heat with my own body so I don’t need to get it externally. This realization was potent – to know that I don’t need to depend on anyone for this basic need comes with tremendous freedom. This isn’t to say that there aren’t moments when it would be inconvenient for me to run around like a goober to warm myself up (I’m not in a hurry to try this tactic at a funeral, for example), but the point is, I know I could if I had to. It also isn’t to say that I can’t accept a sweater or blanket or jacket when it’s offered to me – what a joy it is to receive a gift offered freely with care.

The self-knowledge that I can heat myself up from within allows me to be generous. During that run when I was all toasty, I could have given my jacket to someone who needed it more, and I wouldn’t have felt like I was losing anything. In fact, I would have felt glad to give it away because it would have meant a) I didn’t have to carry it and b) I got to help someone else, which is the greatest feeling in the world. In my experience, when we really tune in to what we want most, the best answer for us often tends to be the best answer for everyone else too.

When we follow our fire, desire, passion, soul calling, whatever you want to call it, it heats us up, it lights us up, and that heat and light flows out to everyone around us. It expands our ability to be compassionate and hold the space for someone else to do what lights them up too. Remember that sand sculptor I mentioned before? Think about that artist doing their thing on the beach, drawing a crowd of people who, of course, stand in awe of the beauty of the art, and also see an example of what it looks like for a person to follow their passion. They go off and think about what it would look like to live their dream too, and perhaps one of them decides it’s their calling to build a museum of ephemera where they want that sand sculptor to be a featured artist. Now that artist is making an income doing what they love, the museum founder is living their calling of curating temporary works of art, and the many people who visit these spaces and interact with these people feel the magick and potential and find the courage to do their weird thing too. It becomes a self-charging system, a beautiful dance of courage, grace, faith, and fulfillment. What if this is what it’s all about?