“There’s no passion, there’s no passion
There’s no passion, I need passion”

- Rod Stewart – Passion

Lately I’ve been thinking about passion.  Not like THAT you massive perv, but in the sense of something which you really care about, something which drives you in your spare time or that you follow as a full time pursuit.

I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a career which means I get to do something I really care about.  Namely work at a students’ union within a university to help students have opportunities to do things beyond their degree, and also work to help ensure that those students get an effective voice at the table when important decisions that affect their education get made.  I enjoy it, I believe it makes at least a vague difference to a few peoples lives, and I think I’m pretty good at it.  But I’m not sure it counts as a passion.

Sure I can put together a pretty decent training session that lights up Indicator 4 of Chapter B5 in the UK Quality Code for Higher Education (SO COOL), and I wrote a dissertation on volunteer motivations for an MSc which I was rather pleased with.  But it’s kind of hard to share that with anyone except people who do similar roles at other students’ unions, and even then it’s far more interesting just catching up with people when you’re at some students’ union hacks conference.

Beyond that though, I don’t really have any passions, and I want to have one.  I don’t feel like I have anything which I can properly share with people and, dearest internet, it makes me a tiny bit sad to come home from work, cook some food, watch telly, browse twitter/reddit/facebook and have that pretty much be it for the evening.  I’m jealous of people who can get utterly sucked into the support of a football team, or live music, or travelling the world and getting exciting about experiencing other cultures, because at the moment I feel slightly detached from life.  My deeply sexy pals Stephen and Jonathan over the past few years have really got into ice hockey, to the extent that Stephen now does audio and PA work for the Sheffield Steelers (which came out of fiddling about with DJ equipment) and Jonathan does commentary for online streams of Hull Stingrays matches, which by all accounts is tremendously successful.  I don’t do anything which even remotely resembles a communal experience like that.

Recently I moved from Leeds to Aberystwyth for a new job, and I think it’s important that I should fix this.  Moving to a place where you don’t know anyone is tricky enough, though this being the third time I’ve done it you’d hope I’m getting the hang of it, and it’s made harder when that town is particularly small (only one McDonalds? Seriously?!).  So I’d like to start doing things.  I’d like to develop a hobby, and hopefully a passion, beyond reading politics blogs and getting grumpy.

So.  Tell me your passion.  How did you find it?  Where’s it led you?  What would you be doing right now if you had the time and resources?

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