Ambition and Passion

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Essays - Ambition and Passion

I go to camp every year and allow myself to love people, dreading the day when I will have to depart from them. I claw at each moment, attempting to hold on to time. I do this even though I know from the beginning that as soon as I enter I will be hurled towards the last day, towards the end, towards good-bye. And it breaks my heart. Yet every year, I'm just so grateful to have had my heart broken.

If there is one secret to living life it is passion: passionate love, passionate hate, passionate hope, passionate joy, passionate work, passionate play, passionate pain and despair. Feel things to the tips of your fingertips, to the center of your soul. It's the only way that you'll get something worth getting out of life. It's the only way that you'll realize everything that I've attempted to tell you in this letter, because heaven knows that I am merely giving you words, not experience. Live your life so that you may, in the end, be able to sit around a table and eat, drink, and be merry with your family and friends and tell stories. That's where your happiness is, in the ability to laugh at your life and cling to it dearly at the same time.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.

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