A Hobby Or A Habit?

Chris is a firefighter's firefighter.  He is passionate about the equipment. He is passionate about the people he gets to help. He is passionate about the honor of a career in the fire service. He is passionate enough to attend a training to sharpen his skills on his vacation time. When a college kid at the same training referred to firefighting as a hobby, Chris was not passionate in affirming that kind of divided enthusiasm. Would he have my back, Chris questioned? Would he rescue someone on the second floor if doing so involved in some personal risk?  

Chris didn't have a chance to ask these questions or confront this attitude during the brief training. Perhaps someone else in a more long-standing relationship with this kid will have the opportunity fo model professionalism and to extend it to confrontation where necessary. If not, the progression is predictable, and extends far beyond firefighting. Observing a similarly nonchalant attitude in a young pitcher, Michael Lewis laments in Moneyball, "He is too young to realize we are what we pretend to be." That is, says Lewis, attitudes taken on for convenience or self protection in early chapters of one's development as a worker tends to unintentionally shape what we actually become.  

John Jarndyce in Charles Dickens's Bleak House attempts to confront this attitude. He is the guardian of Richard Carstone in the novel and sets him up in a profession to which the two of them agree.  When the young Carstone becomes bored with the tedium of learning the language and routines that will define much of his adult life, Jarndyce is both sympathetic and serious. Learning a different profession is fine, he says, but great care must be taken NOT to simultaneously learn a careless attitude. The habit, he says, of looking around the edges of one's work in the automatic assumption that something else would be better or more exciting is alluring and hard to get rid of.  

Encounters with Chris's wattage of enthusiasm don't have to abound in order to impact us in a culture sopping with sitcom cynicism. Passionate workers like Chris don't even have to transcend the laws of human inconsistency to impact us in there better moments.  Even Jarndyces may offer us a word of caution now and again, though we have aged past their legal obligation to intervene.  Are we open to either?  Can we nod to the one whose passion outshines ours and rekindle our passion in place of our envy?  Can we embrace the one with courage enough to confront what is lukewarm in us?  Or, like the Dickens character, does he intervene in vain?


Or, is this the week we won't check the Chris-like passion that elevates our calling beyond a hobby with health insurance? This willingness to stand out, this sense that the same small things matter because, as Mother Teresa said, we do them with great love, is what attracts the attention. This passion is what attracts the attention to speak into other people's lives, and gives us credibility when we cautiously do so. We may, with an honest and well-timed word about the pull of mediocrity in our own lives, enliven someone we influence to live out the fullness of their potential.