“What is your passion?” she asks next as we sit there talking on the front of the boat. “I don’t know really, I can’t say sports or something like that because they’re really not my passion. Hmmm, I guess…life!” I reply with a grin, thinking at first I was taking an easy way out of the question.  “I love to learn, I’m always trying to keep up to date on the latest research across all the different scientific fields to understand the world just a bit more. There’s so much to learn and it’s all just so incredible and amazing!” She smiles at me, inhales on her cigarette and goes back to her writing.

Later as I’m lying there staring at the clouds change from one shape to another I wonder, is it true? Do I really believe that this is my passion? I start to think about my answer.

I love learning about our world because it allows me to appreciate everything I see for the majesty and beauty contained within it. A thunder cloud isn’t something that makes you pissed off for having forgotten your umbrella, but rather it’s an amazing display of dust particles captured in tiny water droplets which have been travelling through incredibly powerful wind currents over thousands of kilometers, finally coming to a perfect moment where temperature, pressure and density causes it to cease floating in the heavens above and submit to the force of gravity, barrelling down through the atmosphere to finally land in an outstretched hand.

It’s trying to learn how to turn any moment into something positive by finding something in it to appreciate, to get your mind in a positive state, to create your own persistent euphoric utopia…

It’s chasing and creating a life with ever more and more perfect moments. Each adding just a few more notes to our staccato illusion of time.

My passion is to have done the best I could with the life I had, for myself and those around me. Bringing smiles to the faces of others, sharing and creating those euphoric moments of life’s perfection with them.

Contemplating our fragile mortality is frightening and it’s difficult not to allow that fear control my actions in life, but I’ve realized the moment you allow that…you cease to live.

I want to turn even the reality of my eventual death from something terrible to one of those moments. That even facing it, I’ll smile, and appreciate the microcosm of a life I had to appreciate the microcosm of my life…