Passion

I've been thinking about words lately. The power they have over us. How they can mean so much and yet we use them like they mean nothing. Love, awesome, hero, depressed- we use these words everyday and yet do we truly know what they mean? 

I remember my grade eight teacher having this conversation with us. He told us how once he was walking across a dam behind a little girl. As he was walking, the little girl slipped and almost fell into the water. Now for those of you who have never seen a dam, it is a huge, powerful and extremely violent pool of water (just google it). If the young girl had fallen into the water she would of drown but luckily my english teacher had been there and caught her.

Now you are probably wondering how this all connects. My english teacher asked us, at this point if that meant he was a hero. I think every student in the class raised their hand to say yes. He told us that we were all wrong. But why? He saved the life of a young child, that must mean he is classified as a hero. But hero is defined as "a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities." Courage and brave are two words used in that definition. So either you need to be afraid or be at risk to do a heroic deed. My english teacher had caught the girl. He was at no risk himself, he didn't dive in to the dam after her to pull her out. He just caught her. 

Of all the classes I've ever had that class sticks out the most. We as humans want to feel passion. Love and hate, sadness and joy. We all want to feel the same type of love that Paris felt for Helen, or the hate Hera felt for Zeus's lovers. We read fantastic stories and expect our lives to live up to them. We want to happy like Cinderella when she finds her prince or be sad like in the endings of our favourite romantic movies. So we use words to try and trick the world into thinking were passionate, instead of actually spending time finding something were passionate about.