Passion Divided

You’ve probably read about, and possibly spent some time thinking about, finding your passion.  This is how we are supposed to identify what we want to do in life.  It’s how we are supposed to choose our career and our life’s work.  If you don’t know this yet, you obviously haven’t been listening to Oprah or Dr Phil or reading the monthly ladies’ magazines.

Since I stopped working for banks, I have given a great deal of time to thinking about my passion(s).  I include the (s) because I can’t narrow down my interests to one singular passion.  I have many.    I love the outdoors, the indoors, poetry, history, people, birds, animals, travel, cooking, sewing, the arts, anything creative, driving, writing, sharing my knowledge of financial planning, photography, communicating with my friends and with total strangers, my family, gardening, fashion, old movies/TV,  etc, etc, and not in that particular order.  The question is:  How do I narrow it down?

First, I decided to continue with the financial planning part because that’s what I do and I have a great deal of information and help I can offer to people.  It is also a way I know I can make a living.  What after that?  It was a toss up between writing fiction, writing about finances, and writing about cooking/food.  I already have a monthly gig writing about finances, and since that ties in with my career (aka how I earn a living), I will continue.  I know I have to write every day.  I’ve been a writer since I was about 8 years old and I don’t think I can stop.  My normal form of story telling is fictional mysteries. That seemed to be a good choice for me to continue but I have always loved cooking and lately I’ve been more interested in writing about food.  Can the two be combined?  Mysteries involving food?  No.  Can’t do it.

I read something interesting recently that said, “When you procrastinate, the thing you are doing during that time of procrastination, is maybe what you should be doing full time.”  (Sorry I can’t recall where I read it or who said it.) My ‘spare’ time is spent equally between reading cookbooks and actually cooking and reading news.  The news portion is what has always given me ideas for my mystery stories.  I can see a story about a murder and three years later I see another news story about a location, a character, or a different crime and my mind links the 2, 3, 4, 5 or more stories and a new mystery novel forms.  I don’t know if this is the way other mystery writers get their ideas, but it is how I get mine.

So, back to the quandary.  Food or murders? 

I am thinking I will continue cooking and looking at cookbooks but will still focus on the mysteries. 

That is, when I am not helping people with financial planning, asset allocation, estate planning, and finding ways to meet financial goals.