Personal Insights: Make Covid-19 the pandemic that saw you return to your passions

In our latest Personal Insights, Michael O Sullivan, expresses the hope that Covid-19 will be seen - and can still become - the pandemic which prompted many to rediscover what they are passionate about in life.

New Year's resolutions

Now that we are on the road to back to our pre-pandemic lives it may be a good time to take stock and ask do we want those old lives back.

I was one of those people who had put aside many of my own passions until Covid struck and when I heard the old Irish proverb “You will never plough a field by turning it over in your mind” I was prompted into action.

Like many others the pandemic was a time to rediscover the passions that had went unpursued or hidden talents that had went unexplored.

So, what is your passion? What have you left behind that made you happy and somehow a busy life just got in the way?

For me it was spending more time writing.

 

 Having recently had my first article published I realised that when you write, you expose a little bit of your private self and there is a  sense of satisfaction in that - not just to pay the mortgage or put food on the table - but for the soul.

Now at 59, I am finding the time during this pandemic to write, which is an extension to a lifelong passion for reading and learning.

My late mother always told a story when as a child in London and we went visiting shops with books and toys I would always go for the books.

This pandemic has given me time to find a way back to doing something that has always given me great satisfaction and will now continue to do so as long as my cognitive functions remain intact.

As Steve Jobs once said “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe to be great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

If you haven’t found it yet keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

So go ahead plough that field.

* Michael O Sullivan was born in London but moved with his family to Clare when he was 8. He has worked most of his adult life as an Engineer for American multinationals.