Once, when my wife and I saw him fixing his car, my better-half blurted out a side comment: "I don't understand this guy, there's seems not a day in his life that he does not do something with his car."
"It's a passion. Things that we love to do but don't know why," I told her. "It's just like my passion for writing."
"But you are a journalist so you have to write," she retorted.
"I do some blogging which is not part of my job," I said.
I cited blogging purposely because it's my passion that she always complains about, saying that I could have used the time I spent for blooging to take some rest or do other productive endeavors.
I kept on telling her that blogging is some sort of theraphy after a week's work that is focused more on the technical side of journalism - layouting that does not interest me much, editing, rewriting or writing stories that you don't like to write.
Journalism, which I enjoyed when I was young, has become a job. I remember Filipino consul Jose Jacob once telling me when he was still assigned here in Jeddah that our job becomes work when we lost the passion for it.
I forget my job and the world when I start blogging, pouring in my ideas into words, a passion that goes back to my high school days when I used to write verses that I passed on for poetry or love letters I slipped into the books and notebooks of the girls in our class and relished their wondering on who the letter writer could be.
My late cousin, an engineer, once dubbed me crazy for using the dictionary in writing love letters to the village lasses who had not even reached the primary grades during the summer school breaks. I shrugged off his comment because I was not really interested with the girls but with the wonders of playing with words that seemed to beat with the rythm of my life.
Having cast my eyes to a career in engineering, I had never thought that my passion for writing could lead me to journalism. Call it destiny but I dropped my dream to become an engineer when I realized that, as a working student, the course was too expensive and I couldn't afford to buy even a slide rule.
While many people find fame and fortune out of their passion - Newton, Einstein, the Wright brothers, Shakespeare and an endless array of names that we cannot count with our fingers and toes - I don't expect much out of my blogging. Yes, I do entertain possibilities that it may give me some passive income later on but until then I have learned to leave such cares to fate.
Passion, which is closely tied to our search for self-gratification, is one of life's mysteries that drive us to keep on going through the doldrums of daily living. It's an anathema to reason that assures us that we are more than atoms.
Please see my other blog Fun in Life salt-funstories.blogspot.com
