Oh, my favorite!  Passion.  I love to feel passionate about things–it makes me feel alive.  I love thinking about Tillie seeing a bike for the first time or Althea Gibson swinging a tennis racket for the first time.  Magic!  Connection.  Your job in life is to contribute and to do that, you should feel passionate about what you do.  If you had to guess, what do you think is my overriding passion right now?

No, it’s not writing books (this was a trick question).

I feel passionate about you.  I feel passionate about helping you find the tools necessary to discover your own passion and pursue it.  When I am going uphill in a headwind I will be thinking about your faces, your questions, your health and well-being.  We all need to feel like we are making a difference.  Whether you are painting a picture for a sick friend or crocheting hats for newborn babies or helping your team win a game or cleaning up trash in the park so little kids don’t get hurt.  Your passion might be to create something, to help people, to invent a cure for cancer.  It doesn’t matter.

Passion is what grabs you.  Pursuing it is what keeps you cycling uphill in a headwind (or in Tillie’s case–working overtime to afford a bike–or in Althea’s case, surviving the grueling pain of hours and hours of practice).  If you say you want to join the track team, but you don’t really feel passionate about it, you may not have the strength to follow through.  So your job is to figure out what makes you so happy, so excited, so right that you are willing to do the hard work to pursue it.

My passion is reaching out to you!