Passion. It’s something we’re all told to dig for and pursue starting very early on in life. Find your passion and follow it, easy as that, right? Wrong.

During a casual scroll through Instagram I stumbled across something quite insightful. A post by a friend included a quote from a woman named Sally Coulter to which the only appropriate response I have is: preach. (Insert praising hands emoji here).

“It’s messing people up, this social pressure to ‘find your passion’ and ‘know what it is you want to do.’

“It’s perfectly fine to just live your moments fully, and marvel as many small and large passions, many small and large purposes enter and leave your life.

“For many people there is no realization, no bliss to follow, no discovery of your life’s purpose. This isn’t sad, it’s just the way things are. Stop trying to find the forest and just enjoy the trees.”

If this isn’t what I needed during a bout of what most of us know to be the “Sunday night blues,” I don’t know what is.

Somewhere in our journey from children to young adults, we have placed “finding our passion” upon an inaccessible pedestal which causes us to neglect the so called “trivial” aspects of our lives.

I’m talking about the little things.

All too often we feel the need to fulfill this predisposed notion that claims the only way to find happiness is by discovering and ultimately following our passion.

While this idea doesn’t sound so bad on the surface, we are left searching for a deeper meaning in our lives and thus neglect to appreciate the small things simply for what they are.

I like to compare this concept to an experience I think many of us have had at some point during a high school English class.

You read a novel in class and are then forced to dissect every single line for motifs, themes and metaphors and in the midst of it all fail to just appreciate that it was a damn good book.

The blue curtains in the novel don’t always represent some sort of profound meaning, sometimes they’re just blue because they are. End of story.

Even worse, we belittle the passions that we do have because we don’t deem them worthy enough of being our life’s sole purpose.