Can you control passion?

Isn’t that the nature of passion? That it’s out of control? I agree to that it is an awesome power, that is both wonderful and dangerous. It spawns siblings and children of jealousy and hate, love and lust, it makes you the creative artist, the loyal subject, the attentive spouse, the agile sportsman. We need it, but it needs attention not to draw us in the wrong direction. A life without passion is just a waste.

It’s about impulse control. It may be more difficult for some but we have control over this ultimately.

I agree with @The_Compassionate_Heretic. Even if you always feel the passion, that doesn’t mean you have to always act on the passion…

There’s a difference between doing things with passion and letting passion lead you by the nose.

It is possible to cultivate the ability to abandon one’s self completely to an activity, become lost in it, revel in it. This is a kind of joyous surrender that can be applied to any endeavor. It’s a matter of learning how to get the self out of the way in even ordinary circumstances.

It’s a different matter to be on a constant lookout for a new peak experience so that you can once again feel the endorphin rush. That approach is an addictive behavior pattern. It leads to a polarization of one’s life experiences into mundane, dreary ones that you just have to trudge through, and the passionate peak moments when life goes Technicolor. That’s a never ending cycle of highs and crashes, just like heroin addiction.

Nope, and it is part of everything I do.
It is a matter of seeing ahead and seeing the signs in order to navigate through it properly. And/or being prepared to stay afloat, if it gets too rough.

Hm. I guess I’d like to begin this thought by exploring what passion is. I like Harp’s characterization, “to abandon oneself completely to an activity.” Harp, you may like Tom McCarthy’s book about this, Remainder. daloon, I wonder at your characterization of passion – I know that you like for people to interpret your words for themselves, or I’d ask for clarification, but as it stands it seems to me from both your first paragraph (because you specifically mention love and sex) and your third one (The diagram I get in my head from your description is a channel from the “love, sex” side of things moving in an increasingly organized process over to the art side of things) that you think that the sublimation of passion to art is something that one makes a deliberate decision to do. Moreover, you seem to be saying that the wellspring of passion is the emotion of love and the act of sex. I don’t buy that. I think it’s more the other way around – that being passionate, in exactly the way that Harp and Tom McCarthy describe it (as getting the self out of the way/dissolving the thought-barrier between oneself and one’s actions) is itself the experience we strive to get to again each time we induce an emotion or perform an act such as being in love, having sex, and creating art. Also, I don’t thing that passion exists apart from the actions we take in feeling passionate.

So, control: Given the definition I’m choosing for “passion”, it can’t really be an experience of passion unless there is some amount of uncontrol.

Me, I don’t feel much passion. So no, when I feel it I don’t try to control it. For the third question you ask, “If so, where do you channel it, and how do you accomplish that feat?”, I would like to interpret it on the terms I mentioned above. As far as what kind of art I perform passionately, that would be playing the clarinet.

@wildpotato [puts Remainder on hold]

@wildpotato A lot to think about there!

I think that for me it’s a matter of intensity. I.e., there’s passion, and then there’s passion! I get passionate at work, dealing with clients. I get excited about ideas and I love helping them. I love thinking about things, and I am passionate about these analytical processes. Passion helps me focus, because it narrows my vision to whatever it is I am passionate about. It’s like a kind of fugue state. And it happens to me all over the place.

However, with another person—a new person—it is more like the addictive kind of thing that @Harp is talking about. There is a rush. Maybe it’s endorphins—I don’t know—but it’s definitely a rush. It’s like candy to a kid. You know those experiments about delayed gratification? They put a kid in a room with a dish of candy, and tell them that if they don’t eat any now, they can have a lot more later. Then the adult leaves the room. Some can stay away, and others can’t.

When an opportunity for that rush appears, I become more like an impulsive child than on who can delay gratification. It feels the way I imagine a crack high might feel to someone who uses that drug. I think that the reason I am asking these questions is that I am seeking to control my impulses by desensitizing myself to them. I feel that redirecting them may help me.

I know about the highs and the crashes. @Harp has been through them with me, and has been very helpful to me in the past [thanks, man]. Actually, I think that control is not the right thing for me to attempt. I have learned not to try to control these feelings. I fail, and then I feel worse about myself. As I tell everyone else who asks about depression, I try to distance myself from my thoughts about these feelings. I try not to judge them so much, and not to be attached to them. I can’t stop them, but I don’t have to focus on them.

I guess I’m powerless before passion, too. It is exhausting trying to control it. It is exhausting feeling guilty about where it takes me. It is counter-productive to beat myself up about it. I don’t care if it’s depression or mania; I can easily beat myself up for it. It helps me when I do surrender to it (whichever one it is), and let it play itself out—but only if I can see it as a kind of inevitable process that isn’t really an helpful part of me. If I can do that, I stop taking it so seriously. I stop attributing so much meaning to it. It’s like Reagan said to Jimmy Carter, “there you go again!” Here I go again. It’s an amusement park ride, and at the end of the day, I leave the park and go home. I don’t have to be “down and out in the magic kingdom” [apologies, Cory Doctorow].

I’m dubious about the idea of “rechanelling”. I’m inclined to agree with @wildpotato that passion doesn’t exist independently from its object. It seems like you’re conceiving of passion as a force. I see it more as a condition of merging or unification.

The “force” paradigm would lead you to imagine that such a force could be redirected from one object to another. But the “merging” paradigm would imply that if the merging were undone then the passion would vanish, perhaps leaving a feeling of separation in its wake. And this does seem to be the way it works, from my experience.

In the thrall of the sense of merger that characterizes passion, I agree that the feeling of boundarylessness spills over into other aspects of life and one feels less separated from everything as a result. That’s enlivening, and frees up the mind for creative synthesis. But if that feeling of unity is deriving from, say, being in a new relationship with someone, then I believe that if that relationship were to end, or the feeling of separateness were to resurface in the relationship, then all of that collateral unity would fade as well.

I feel part of being passionate is relinquishing control and enjoying the experience, Art is what does it for me.

There is a form of art where body fluids are mixed into the pigments.

Talk about “relinquishing control”.

@daloon reading your last comment more closely makes me think that what your issue is has a lot less to do with passion and more with newness and addictiveness of each new encounter – it may feel intense like you said but you’re not passionate about them…how can you be passionate about someone if you only know their physical form…you can feel lustful…but not passionate…of maybe that’s just me

I’m with you baby, @daloon.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Hmmm. It’s kind of the other way around for me. When I don’t know what a person looks like or is like, my mind supplies the images and I can easily fall in love with the fantasy I create. The passion I feel provides an impetus that helps me create things I don’t normally create. It is passion about a fantasy more than anything else—it is just sparked by a small kernel of something real.

I guess it’s kind of like buying a lottery ticket. You can fantasize about being rich whether you buy the ticket or not, but if you do buy the ticket, the fantasy seems much more possible. I can fantasize about falling in love or fantasize about someone I lust for any time I want. But if there is something real to base that fantasy on, it comes so much more alive! It’s next to impossible to do otherwise. I have to have this feeling that it could be possible….

I mean, I could fantasize about you. I have a number of your pictures from your various avatars. It would be easy to use the images for such fantasies. But I don’t do it. I never thought of you that way. But if you were to send me a pm that was suggestive or showed any kind of personal interest in me, the fantasies would bloom like a weed on miracle gro!

The fantasies would be based on very little—only what I know about you from what you write here. But that’s what I do. I take next to nothing and spin it into a whole yarn, and then I proceed to believe it without even trying. That’s what passion does for me. It makes something out of nothing. Well, not quite nothing, but definitely a mountain out of a molehill.

I am passionate about my ideas. I tend to fall in love with them, even though I know they are probably foolish or wrong. However these ideas lead me on these mental journeys into fantastic dream worlds, and I can almost make myself feel the things in those dreams as if they were real. I love it! I love it!

The problem is that the passion is so strong, I feel like it has to be real, even though, intellectually, I know it isn’t. It messes me up, though. That’s why I want to control it somehow. I don’t want to mess myself up, but I also don’t want to cut off my fantasy life. I messed myself up a lot in the past few years. It was very painful. But it had its good side, too. Maybe that’s just the nature of bipolarity. I’d like to think that I could steer a more even course, though.

@daloon do you have my pictures in a folder somewhere or something? anyway, that’s okay by me
I guess with you passion comes from non-reality and for me from reality
very interesting

@daloon You’re describing exactly the way that Proust says love works when you say “my mind supplies the images and I can easily fall in love with the fantasy I create. The passion I feel provides an impetus that helps me create things I don’t normally create. It is passion about a fantasy more than anything else—it is just sparked by a small kernel of something real.” You really, really ought to read at least the first volume of his novel In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way. Or if you don’t have enough time, check out the novella in the middle of that volume, “Swann in Love.” It takes you through the whole arc, in extreme and neurotic detail, of Swann’s falling in and out of love. The translation I link to is by far the better one.

At any rate, I have always felt that Proust’s account of love is more an account of obsession. I say so because I’ve also experienced what you and he describe, once – and I think now that it is ¾ obsession and ¼ love. The line between love and obsession, though, is fuzzy as all hell – they tend to bleed into each other very easily. So maybe yours and Proust’s account is the true account, and what I have experienced as love-apart-from-obsession is a pale shade of the obsessiveness that true love actually has. If you do read the book, I’d love to hear what you think.

@all Actually, I believe that everyone should read In Search of Lost Time. It’s more like climbing into another person’s head (and through this gaining massive insight into your own head) than anything else I’ve read. In utter seriousness, I say that if you die without reading this novel, you will have missed out on one of the great experiences of life.

Yes though it’s so much easier to indulge myself even if the passion is up against futile odds.

I’m not sure. I gave up on “Passion” a long time ago. It was just too painful. I don’t feel that I experience it anymore.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Yes, I do keep your pictures in a folder—along with maybe 100 other flutherers. You seem to change your avatar more often, and use more real pictures than other people do. But it’s more that I do it to refer to when I need to picture someone than it is for anything else. The little avatars are too small, so if I want to see the real thing without jumping through all those hoops, and if I want to keep a record of different avatars, I have to save them. Or maybe I’m just a stalker… duh duh duh!

@wildpotato I tried to read Swann’s Way, once. I’m not sure how far I got into it, but it wasn’t very far. Perhaps I was too young and impatient, although I have always been more of a plot man than an interior thoughts man. I find this odd, because what I love to read is so different from what I love to write.

The passion scares me, though, because it does burn me up, and it makes it easier for me to do things that are bad for me. At the same time, I crave it. However, if I were to let myself indulge in it, I would hurt many people who I care about deeply. It’s a difficult conundrum for me. I brought it up with my fellow crazies at group last night, and some said I can’t control it—it’s just part of my nature, and most also said that I should work it through with my therapist. It’s a love-hate kind of thing.

@daloon You know I can, but only in certain contexts. For instance, actual control for passion sexually is very low on the self control side, lol. As for channeling as you so well stated :) I can do this while playing guitar and other artistic things. It’s kind of like “riding the bull” or “Carpe diem” it’s not easy to explain, but I get lost in the moment and let it flow. It’s kind of like willing letting yourself be consumed by your own creative energy and passionately expressing it through your instrument. It’s a great feeling when you fall into this zone in front of a group of people and everyone’s jaw’s drop, lol.

Passion is a complex emotion. If you were to follow Dialectical thinking then passion is only a type of information available to you. Intellect or rationale is the other form of information that balances out emotion. It’s a spinning wheel that looks like the Yin/Yang symbol. If you are totally in emotion you are out of control. If you are totally in rationale you are equally out of touch and out of control. Emotion is hot. Rationale is cold. The only balanced place to be is in the center of the Yin/Yang concept and drawing in information from both sides in balance. This is like standing in the center of one of those playground merry go rounds. If you are on the outside of the wheel you are hanging on and feeling out of control. If you stand up in the middle you can balance yourself upright in total control of what is going on around you. Life works like this. It is possible to experience life fully and still maintain balance or Wise mind most of the time. You can be fully passionate and yet still take in all the appropriate information about context , patterns, thems, choices and consequences at the same time.
I am very passionate but I channel it appropriately give the context of the setting and situation we are talking about. It’s a matter of focusing on what is going to be effective and then doing that.