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July 24, 2013, Port Severn, Ont. – “Where you find your passion, you find your purpose.”

I
came across that quote on Twitter while searching for some inspiration
for this blog, and it started a full blown conversation with myself (in
my head, of course). Almost as soon as I read the word “passion” I
thought “fire service”. And with “purpose”, my next thought was again, “fire service”. Come to think of it, it was actually more of a feeling than a thought. And there’s an important distinction between the two.

A feeling comes from your gut, as in a gut reaction or gut instinct. It’s something you just know on a visceral level; it’s not something that you have to think about or rationalize.

A thought, on the other hand, is all about using your mental faculties, and as we women know, our thoughts can sometimes create havoc in our lives. Is there a woman out who that hasn’t had a problem making up her mind at one time or another, or found herself obsessing over something that had happened during the day? I’m sure there are men out there, too, who tend to ruminate on things, especially when it comes to the goings on in a fire hall.

There are a lot of things that I have to think about during my day at work that feel somewhat unnatural to me in my role in the planning department, simply because I’m not a planning-technician type of person by nature; it’s a position that I somewhat fell into, and just kind of went with.

Compare that to the feeling that I have when I’m responding to a fire call, and it’s like night and day. I don’t have to think about what I like and or dislike about my role as a firefighter, it’s all about how things feel. (Not to say that there aren’t a bazillion things a firefighter has to think about.) Firefighters are trained to think about and anticipate anything and everything that can happen and try to do things quickly and safely in order to get the job done. But fire fighting is just as much about the feeling as the thinking.

Bottom line, if you’re passionate about your work, then it doesn’t feel like work. The things that you’re passionate about are generally things for which you have a natural inclination for. You absorb new information like a sponge and just can’t get enough of it. That is passion. That’s where you feel your sense of purpose. Fire: yes. Planning: no.

I had a conversation with my boss at work today during which she said to me, “I know it’s your passion” in reference to the fire department. I’m glad she gets that the fire department is my passion.

It’s really too bad that planning isn’t my passion because it would sure make the day go by more quickly!