There is a Talking Heads song that has been living rent-free in my head lately.

Once in a Lifetime.

You know the one.

You may not know the lyrics, but you know the feeling.

You wake up one day and look around at your life and think:

How did I get here?

This is the strange thing about adulthood.

We spend years making decisions.

School. Career. Marriage. Children. House. Money. Responsibilities. More responsibilities. We make plans and then make plans to maintain the plans.

And then one day we look around and realize: Wait. Did I choose all of this? Or did I just keep saying yes?

So I’ve been thinking about passion.

How do we find it?

Maybe we don’t find it by searching harder.

Maybe we find it by getting quiet enough to notice what is already there.

What makes you curious?

What makes you lose track of time?

What did you love before you became practical?

What would you do if nobody knew you were doing it?

What makes you feel ridiculously, irrationally alive?

And whose voice are you hearing when you answer?

Your own?

Your parents?

Society?

The person you thought you were supposed to become?

Because maybe the real existential crisis isn’t that we haven’t found our passion.

Maybe it’s that we’ve been so busy living the life we were supposed to want that we haven’t stopped to ask what we actually want.

And perhaps that’s why Once in a Lifetime feels so unsettling.

Not because the life is necessarily bad.

It may be a very good life.

It’s unsettling because you suddenly realize you are standing inside it asking: How did I get here?

And then comes the much scarier question: Where do I want to go from here?