January 29, 2008

  • ...Yet another post for today.

    I've been trying to find my passion again to tell me where I want to end up.  Unfortunately, my passion's been telling me more and more that although I am passionate about learning, I don't think it will be in the cold, rigid, inflexible, political, and unimaginative world of academia.

    Reconsidering where my greatest passions have been in the past, I enumerate some examples as follows:
    Music, Kung Fu, being creative.... and then come my intellectual passions.

    I think the first and most salient experience with passion is that sense of pure, raw passion that comes with performance.  It's where you get to let something from the inside out, channel it, and just, simply, play.  Let me reflect on the passions enumerated with respect to this aspect.

    With kung fu, it's performance in the sense that each move you make, you channel that inner energy out and release it to create power and movement.  You feel it with each move you make, and when you practice and perform your set movements (like sheet music) contained in the forms.  However, I'll just say that there's no real future in Kung Fu in many, many ways.  Especially not with how it's taught here.  Furthermore, what could I really do with it even if I were to master the art?  With my experience with the world of kung fu, I just don't care anymore.

    Music?  Oh, music, my first love.  Unfortunately, where I was going with Music - classical music - I didn't like that stodgy world it was leading.  The stodgy, backstabbing, egotistical, pretentious world where the love of the craft and art are not first and foremost.

    Any other performance?  I've been considering finding a fiddling teacher and taking it up as a hobby, but I know it's not my future either.

    When I was a young child, I would have loved to do acting - just being able to play, make believe, to let that inner child out and immerse your inner and outer world in imagination, to get to be all those characters you make up in your mind.  My inner child is extremely important to me so in that way, I envy those who succeed in acting.  I did a few elementary school christmas plays and it was fun, but it never really went anywhere.  I don't have the look and there aren't that many really fun roles for asian guys anyway.

    Combine that with the fact that my parents constantly pressured me all through grade school and then undergraduate to move away from anything performance-related, to trade passion for practicality.  I tried my best to temper both demands, but the continual drilling ate away at my consciousness of where my passions lay and my ability to make anything of them.  Recently, looking back upon that, I wonder if that didn't lead to me squandering my best talents.  Sadly, not having followed them, I shall never know now.

    By now, performance is out of the question for me... unlike Camille, I never followed it in any direction that was fruitful.  What's the alternative?  It seems to me that if one looks into the very base and foundation of performance, what stares back at you is self-expression.  Creativity.  I can only hope that if I can grasp onto something in life that is fundamentally creative that perhaps I can still be passionate enough to excel and succeed in it.  This way, I can make use of my intellectual passions in a way that only a wide variety of intellectual passions will allow, by using them as fuel for the act of creation.  Writing, sketching, visualizing, I've always loved the act of creation.  My academic training has also provided me the necessary literary skills to translate my vivid imagination into something concrete in the real world.  I might just have enough talent and ability to do this, I hope.  So... film?  Writing/Directing and novel writing?  It won't be the pure passion of performance, but it will be self-expression in a way that I've been so utterly starved of in my academic schooling.  Perhaps it will help let that inner spirit out that's been screaming to be released from its cage for so very long.  I mean, I've got the smarts to do academia, but not at the cost of a drained soul.

    Come back, my passion...