By Carol Hawke Last week hubby and I were in the car on some routine local chore
and I glanced at him curiously and plied, “When was the last time
you were really excited about your life?” He was taken aback for
a moment and then began laughing rather ominously. It’s not the
laughter I long to hear. “I can’t remember the last time I was
excited about my life,” he replied bitterly. He instantly volleyed
the question back at me, “How about you?” I’m a deep thinker, and
a slow thinker. It took me thirty whole seconds to search within
and come up with a reply. (I confess, I had been working on my
answer longer than he.) “The last time I was really excited about
my life was when I thought I was going to be a dog judge.” Our
conversation pivoted around this particular topic for several minutes
until we both concluded that our individual excitement over life
had definitely waned in recent years. Anything capable of generating
enthusiasm for us now revolves around our adult children and planning
vacations with them. It hadn’t been a jolly holiday season for us. Before Christmas,
my husband’s father suddenly passed away. Certainly this was a
major trauma for the entire family but resulted in an even more
peculiar trauma for me personally. Why? Because I never really
knew him despite two decades of regular association. I began having
odd dreams of men standing inside refrigerators trying to communicate
with me and decided to consult a therapist. He explained to me
that I was very angry. I was angry with my father-in-law for seldom
allowing me past his gruff, protective personal barriers. He was
a man with significant behaviors but his family knew him as a loving
and generous fellow beneath those behaviors. His gruff treatment
was sufficiently troubling in itself but the real issue surfacing
was that this treatment had begun long before him. My own father
had developed protective behaviors in childhood that prevented
him from sharing his true self. Not even his wife or children were
privy to what made him tick. I realized I had never been granted
the privilege of knowing my father the way a daughter needs to.
My husband had repeated his father’s behaviors preventing me from
“getting under his skin” until recent years. Although none of these
men were aware of what they were doing, mine had become a very
lonely and isolated world where they were concerned. Middle age
is a very bad time to discover that you have felt abandoned and
rejected all of your life by an entire sex. It is also an awful
time to realize that you have been metering out your passion in
life upon ‘safer’ applications such as work instead of liberally
applying it to more useful but personally vulnerable opportunities
such as relationships. Just after Christmas I received a call expressing the sorrowful
news that our last friend from the “good old days” in dogs had
passed away. The circle was complete with this dreadful closure.
Dogs have been my youth’s passion and the remarkable people in
dogs the fuel that fed this passion. I’m not the sort of person
that can settle for a second or third best in my life. I will have
it all or I will have none of it. That’s just me. I could never
be happy being a catalog server at dog shows for the rest of my
days when my talent is the dog itself. Everyone has inborn talent,
instincts if you will, for various pursuits – mine had been purebred
dogs. I was born with an ability to assess dogs and can do it with
or without a breed standard at hand (and have been forced to on
occasion.) My sister’s talent is horses. My grandfather had a talent
with chickens and collie dogs. My grandmother, if you’ve read me
well you will recall, was a genius with plants. If you have a talent
for making people feel welcomed and engaged, you should be serving
up catalogs at dog shows. I just didn’t. It’s all or none. I chose
none. It was easy enough to let myself out that door. My excuse? (It’s a valid one by the way.) I get too attached to dogs to raise them and keep them. If I raise them I will always want to keep a good one. That’s where the trouble starts. I quickly become overly protective and anal. There’s the initial portion of my problem. One day the dogs are done with the show and breeding careers and they come home to roost. They happily live out their short lives here and die. That’s the part I can’t handle. They get old and die far too soon. It would seem more appropriate if they lived as long as we, perhaps just a few years less so we wouldn’t be burdened by old age and old dog care simultaneously. But that is not how it happens. It’s called “facing reality.” I’m still working on that one. So the old guard – both public and private – are no longer with us. The days that we fondly recall in dogs hallmarked by a staunch devotion to our breeds and the friends we made in those breeds have come to a screeching halt. The passion that fueled the pursuit is no more. Where do we go from here? You regroup and go on. Okay, you try to regroup and then, in frustration, regroup again but don’t, so you go on anyway. It’s like an unhappy divorce. It doesn’t get better. You just start walking away from it and never stop walking. The further away you get the less real it all seems, the less important, the less excruciating and your excuses become far more finely tuned. You believe them after awhile. Is that good? How would I know? I’m still walking away. Whatever you do in this life, if you don’t have an inborn passion for it and something to ignite that passion you won’t be happy. You won’t be interested or challenged or satisfied. It takes all three ingredients to make a life complete. Are you doing dogs without passion? Don’t! Don’t breed them, don’t attend dog shows or club meetings and, by all means, never sell dogs without a real passion for their lives and futures. Believe in what you are doing with all your heart. Believe it, defend it, but, by all means, don’t bend the moral laws to make it easier. Passion requires all of your intelligence, all of your instincts, all of your desire, all of your commitment and, finally, it requires the deepest faith possible. There are no atheists in dogs or foxholes. There are just believers who simply haven’t explored the full realm of their convictions yet. Without passion there is no morality in anything you do because there is no commitment. When we tell someone, “Your heart is not in what you’re doing,” we mean that individual has no passion for the task. About every ninety days I receive a surprise email or letter from someone in dogs who remembered that I was among you once. These letters are always shocking to me in that the persons who send them are very significant in the dog world. Although such individuals may not dote upon themselves the way others do, they are, without question, prominent people. The second commonality in this correspondence is that the writers continually urge me to return to the dog world or, when they are convinced I will not, to continue writing. You see, the great passion of my life is the written word. Language. It surpasses all other passions combined. It is from this otherwise inexpressible passion I feel every day that the words emerge. They form a recognizable pattern you’ve grown accustomed to and when you embrace them, they engage you, momentarily, in what I am feeling. Within that embrace you are able to realize the depths of your own passion. You can touch base with the deepest part of yourself and feel no shame or fear in it. There is nobody nearby to see your tears falling or laughter pealing from within. Nobody but God that is, and He never tells. That’s one of His very best qualities I think. The conclusion of the matter is this; everyone must have a specific outlet for his or her passion in life. That outlet can be the most difficult avenue to find and it often requires enormous courage on your part. But when you do step out into it, you will truly come alive! Passion creates its own renewable energy source: raw enthusiasm. When you work passionately you don’t notice illness, aging, fears, doubts, disappointments or heartache nearly as much. Your passion will carry you straight through it all. Not untouched but rather, unscathed. Nobody can fake passion long, not in a bedroom and not in a boardroom. Certainly not in the tightly knit world of dogs! It has to be rooted so deeply within that you cannot dislodge it even with a bevy of finely tuned excuses and damning disappointments. Find your passion and you will find your life my friend. Find your passion and you will find yourself. It really is as simple as that.
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