Headmaster’s Blog on Passion—to open the new term—Jan. 4th 2010

This morning in the chapel, after welcoming some new members of our school community, I explained why I felt that passion was an essential feature of any successful organization or enterprise. With passion comes energy which elevates us all above the humdrum or the indifferent. It is invariably closely followed by its partner, enthusiasm, and both can be contagious in the most desirable of ways. This morning as I considered listing some of the outstanding examples of passion in the people we have working and studying here, I had to scrap the idea as the list would have been huge. That’s the secret of Shawnigan and, of course, the fun job is to control and manage all that passion! Quoting Eli Wiesel, I re-iterated the avoidance of apathy:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

It’s hard to talk about passion without mentioning the risk of failure and how to deal with that. History is replete with notables from Abraham Lincoln to the Beatles or Thomas Edison to Michael Jordan, who all encountered crushing disappointment and thwarted hopes to go on to greatness. Somewhat fittingly, in our present context, the defeats can be seen as rain and none other than Dolly Parton captured it well when she reputedly said, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

So, passionately clear on what is needed for the new term, we sang a few verses of the Ripley’s hymn so that Mr. Samuel could hear it at his house along the road—pausing before the last verse to inject some real passion and, in the process, to rouse even the sleepiest of souls and send them on their way!