The Dispassionate Pursuit of Passion

I recently came across an extremely interesting concept called “The Dispassionate Pursuit of Passion” that was taught in a Coursera class on Happiness by Professor Raj Ragunathan. It was a suggestion for an approach to pursuing goals as a way to maximizing Happiness which involves having a certain “preference” for certain outcomes over other outcomes “before” these outcomes occur, but “not judging” outcomes “after” they’ve occurred which mitigates the negativity from categorizing certain outcomes as bad outcomes.

He went on to say that this is actually quite difficult to achieve because we have to make a “Mind-Switch” from what he calls a “pre-occurraence preference” to a “post-occurrence non-judgementalism” which basically means that we have to go from wanting things a certain way to accepting and acknowledging how things turned out whether negative or positive because we don’t know whether they really ARE negative or positive in the long run.

There’s a TED Talk by a David Steindeldrass, a famous Catholic Benedictine monk, who says that we don’t have to be grateful for everything, but we DO have the OPPORTUNITY to be grateful in every moment; that we should RISE to the CHALLENGE of finding the opportunity in that very bad moment that we perceive as negative, we are given the opportunity to ENJOY. We can rise up to meet the challenge by learning something, to suffer, to stand up for our convictions. “We always get another opportunity,” he goes on to say, “That’s the wonderful richness of life.”

Thus, we can be grateful, even when negative things happen to us. This is something very tough to put into practice, but Dr. Raj asks us to start upon an exercise that will help you turn that negative energy into a meaningful positive one which is the act of writing down 3 apparently bad things that happened during the day that later turned out to be good.

Here are the 3 that I wrote down:

1. We went Pokemon hunting with our parents yesterday and didn’t catch any super rare Pokemon, but we got to go to a part of Long Beach we’d never been to as a family, AND we caught enough Magikarp to evolve a Gyarados.
2. We woke up late and didn’t get to go hiking at O’Melveny Park in time, but we got to see where the trails went and what kind of clothes we should wear the next time we go.
3. We were stuck in traffic for a very long time on our way down to the Family Party, but I was able to write another chapter of my writing challenge and watch 2 videos of my Coursera course!

So now looking back on those events, I actually don’t consider them bad at all because they actually helped me achieve other goals that I had been wanting to accomplish.

I’ve been struggling with a strange form of control where if something doesn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, I let that moment steal away my happiness and I concentrate on how I didn’t get what I wanted.  However, if I just embrace the process and know that I have certain preferential outcomes, and after that outcome happens, not imposing any judgement on it, instead accept how things turned out and actually see the opportunity to enjoy and see the positive outcomes from it, then I can retain my happiness and fully embrace it to fully live life and all the wonder it holds. Because, there will always be more good things to come, and even good things to come that are hidden in the present moment that we just don’t see or realize. So we have to train ourselves every day, every single moment, to see those things that God is trying to reveal to us.

I think this is the first step to developing that “Implicit Trust” in life, and know that everything will be okay, and that we’re taken care of in ways we just can’t see yet.