Passionate people.
In the 2011 movie, “The Green Hornet”, actor Seth Rogan tells Kato, “You don’t need to be afraid of dying, you need to be afraid of not living”.
As active thinking creatures, our attention is captured by things like, Money and material objects or Experiences and Travel. Even some people attention is captured by other people. Passionate people take those ideations to the extreme but it always seems to come down to ‘people’, good or bad, for those that are remembered in history. As in the Rockefellers that have donated a lot of their money to benefit other people or Explorers such as Columbus, Magellan who combined experiences with exploration that benefited the world or in the case of people, there are persons such as soldiers that die a young death for their country and its people, then there are people who give up money, things and experiences for people themselves such as Mother Theresa, Dr. Livingston of Scotland who went to Africa and yes, even the most famous, Jesus Christ. Even today, Scottish bagpipes play John Newton (1799) song, “Amazing Grace” in parades and funerals. Christ is also remembered by 100’s of millions of people around the world over the centuries in worship and study about him. It seems as if the people who are remembered in history are the passionate ones, yes even Adolph Hitler on the side of evil.
One passionate person we remember is an artist by the name of Vincent Van Gogh. He was a Christian that went into the missionary field, he wanted to marry one young woman but the family did not like his situation. Finally, he started painting, one of his friends was painter Paul Gaugin. He fell in love with a prostitute and cut off part of his ear lobe for her (now that’s passion). (Wikipedia); Following his first exhibitions in the late 1880s, Van Gogh's fame grew steadily among colleagues, art critics, dealers and collectors.[170] After his death, memorial exhibitions were mounted in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. In the early 20th century, there were retrospectives in Paris (1901 and 1905), and Amsterdam (1905), and important group exhibitions in Cologne (1912), New York City (1913) and Berlin (1914).[171] These had a noticeable impact on later generations of artists.[172] By the mid 20th century Van Gogh was seen as one of the greatest and most recognizable painters in history.. Diagnoses that have been put forward include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit and been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.
Van Gogh’s passion is remembered by musician songwriter, Don Mclean in his ballad, “Starry Starry Nights”.
