Living life with professional passion

I’m really struggling on the blogging front at the moment. I have so much work to do – both in the office and in my ‘free’ time – that it’s extremely hard to get my thoughts in order to write anything significant about the EU at present. It also does not help that the Finnish Presidency is not making much headway on REACH or on Turkey. Further, the Polish veto of the EU-Russia Treaty is a negative signal of what might be to expected in the future. With the bland ‘leadership’ of Matti Vanhanen, and relative silence from the European Commission, it’s hard to find much optimism about the EU at present. Ségolène Royal seems the only (possible) glimmer of hope – at least in that she signals some sort of departure from the old style of French-EU politics.

But there’s something more fundamental that I am asking myself about. What actually makes me tick? What makes me get up in the morning and go and do the things I do? That’s somehow related to EU politics, its related to website work, its related to political communication. But I also badly need a spark from the environment that I am working with, and some sort of sense that what I am doing has some use, that it is somehow leading somewhere. I seem to just be living for the next day at the moment; there’s no plan, there’s no reflection, there’s no strategy. I have a mass of tasks to complete, but I’m master of none of them.

These feelings have been exacerbated by an excellent evening yesterday spent with friends of friends – a couple where the man is freelance photographer, and the woman a freelance graphic designer. They both have such a drive, a determination, an intensity about what they do – they care for it, live it. I used to have that sort of professional passion when I was President of JEF, but that all seems to have dissipated over the last couple of years. How I wish I could rediscover it!