At what point in our working lives does the need to create become the need to keep?

I was looking at a packet of bread and noticed the makers name. He is a guy who is famed for his cooking and high calibre restaurants. Sadly, he is also bankrupt. I am wondering if he is trying to work out how or when his desire, passion and creativity towards cooking was over taken by the need for the latest business model, another money spinning venture or when the love of food became the love of more.

If there will be any good to come from this global meltdown - and I think there is good to come from it - it’s how this meltdown will reveal the priorities in our lives. The financial collapse will take away everything we take for granted and reveal that upon which we have been building our lives. And in so doing expose the frailty of it, telling us what we really always knew: anything built upon cash - whether status, stuff or situation - is really only a mirage.

That said, the crash will bring into a very crisp perspective the stuff of a real life: people. The greatest resource in the world really is human. Humanity is all we have and in the end all we need for a lasting and meaningful life. You and me. Me and you. It’s the people around us that will remain standing in the midst and long after this crises is over. Surely humanity is more than its houses, more than clothes, more than the people we try to impress. Humanity, western anyway,  is more than what it thinks it needs. At our core is the need to coexist, cooperate and coerce each other to grow as individuals, living from a sense of passion rather than profit.

Passion cannot be valued nor measured in terms of it’s effectiveness and influence. We must live, work and even dream from a sense of passion. Passion inspires. Passion creates energy and momentum. Passion solves problems. Passion removes obstacles. Passion enlarges our vision of what might and, one day, could be.

Profit reduces our thinking to the bottom line. We cannot be ignorant of the bottom line. But neither can the content and meaning of our lives be measured by it. 

The trouble with having more is the need to look after it and I wonder who is looking after it. Do we keep our stuff, or is our stuff keeping us? Let’s keep passionate about what we do. Let passion steer out lives. The profit is born from passion. But you can never create passion from profit.