How do you experience passion?

There are a lot of things that one could be passionate about: work, a website, a person and much much more. For me, I would call it a kind of intensity. I am totally focused on what I am doing. It feels important. Almost like it is about saving a life. It is easiest for me to be passionate about another person. I feel like I get some kind of energy that I imagine as a sort of blue force field reaching out demanding that the other person return that focus. It feels like a power.

When my focus is on some task, or some presentation to a group, or about an issue that is really important to me, the words fly out and I can’t even begin to make my mouth or my fingers move fast enough to capture all the thoughts. Instead, I just rely on this sense of intensity that somehow conveys the depth of my feeling about a subject. It’s like there’s some neon sign over my head flashing, “this matters!” “This Matters!” over and over. Sometimes it seems to shock people. They pull back to look at me fully in my face and say with disbelief that it is actually possible, “You really care!?!”

For me, it’s an “of course I do. How could you think otherwise?” But I gather that people aren’t used to others actually caring about them, or about an idea. Sometimes I imagine that my passion is strong enough to heal people. To show them that they do matter.

How does it feel when you are passionate? What kind of power does it bring you? Do you cultivate it? Does it scare you? When you see it in other people, how does it affect you?