Guest post: A passion for being in love, by Nancy Zimmerman

Credit: Tony M....

I know what it is to have had love, and lost it. I mean the kind of love we all seek, if we’re honest about it – the high romance that inspires poetry and films, the kind that leaves you wild and satisfied all at the same time.

It was the love of a good, intelligent and honest man who was everything I’d ever hoped for, and more. He read me poetry in latin, for heaven’s sake! (and if you don’t know what those Romans wrote, your loss) It was a love that entirely eclipsed my previous two decades of serial monogamy. There was no doubt in my mind, after being an atheist about these sorts of things, that he was The One. And for just over a year, he thought so too. And then he didn’t.

And so I learned the limits of passionate romance.

I know what it is to have poured every creative impulse, every Great, Big idea that came in the middle of the night, every bit of business acumen into growing my own business. It was (and who knows? may yet be) a good business, one that, I believe, would have contributed to the well-being of both people and planet. It was coaching people to manage their money wisely and thoughtfully (and god knows, our fault lines as a culture in this area may yet surface and take a good many of us down into a terrifying chasm) . And while there was every reason to believe it could and should become a phenomenal success story, after four years of my best, I hit my personal wall. I needed a break. While I still hold gentle hopes for it, my zeal is tempered with sober experience and prolonged fatigue.

And so I learned the limits of my entrepreneurial passion.

Now I find myself at mid-life having discovered something lovely. After the tears, the disappointments, the self-recriminations and frankly, confusion (my life has not played out as the story was supposed to go) I’ve discovered a passion deeper than I expected, and that’s a passion for the very fact of life itself. It’s difficult to articulate, but it’s something like this: the externals of my life don’t initially appear to be what I was passionate about. But here I AM. I AM. I still know how to love, and probably more widely and generously. I still experience the muse of creativity and have discovered a much deeper appreciation for the creativity of others. This passion for life itself moves me – almost embarrassingly at times. Tiny birds, their delicate little movements, bring tears to my eyes. So does watching Dene people drum dance – that deep heartbeat prayer. So does, as corny as it sounds, the Where The Hell is Matt video, two years later.

So for the second half of life, while I hope I do enjoy romance again at some point, and I do hope my latent business will yet fully come into its potential, my major passion is: to be as awake as possible to the glory of life itself. To ground myself not so much in the quality of my own life, as in the marvelousness of the interplay of carbon and oxygen and colours and genius, and of our own human capacity for good and evil. So along with the poet Robert Browning, I invite anyone to ““Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!’”

This is Entry # 36 of 49

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