Passion and Compassion

Passion is one of the most powerful emotions a person can experience. When a person is passionate about something, such as work, the pursuit of knowledge, or attaining any particular goal, a person usually approaches life with a great and boundless enthusiasm.

Compassion, on the other hand, has more to do with how a person views the rest of the world than it does how a person feels about his or her own goals, ambitions, or desires. The feeling of compassion encompasses a deep empathy for other people. A compassionate person is one who is able to empathize with the emotions, feelings and experiences of another person and who also feels some sort of camaraderie with the other person. When a person is able to feel compassion for another, then he or she wants to share in that other person's suffering as well as the other person's victories.

A passionate person can only go so far if he or she does not take the plight of others into account. As John Donne said, many years ago, no man is an island. So if a person pursues happiness or work or even financial goals with great passion, but without taking into consideration how his or her actions may influence other people, then the passion is a self absorbed and isolated emotion which is not as likely to sustain its force if the person who experiences passion combines it with a feeling of compassion for others.

Compassion takes into account other human be

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earn things when I least expect to. For example, sometimes I learn from debating ideas with other students or by talking to my teacher after class. Also, there times I learn by working in groups, or by doing some activity with others, I learn how they think and am able to observe new ways of doing things. Also, I often learn by brainstorming. In classes or situations where I have been too focused on getting a good grade, I often miss out on the process of learning, which is much more important than the end itself. The process by which I learn and become an educated person is not always linear. I may begin a class wanting to learn how to perform a specific task, but along the way I could find that there are aspects of a particular subject that I never knew about that interest me more than the thing that I first wanted to learn about. Learning, like art, is the process of discovery. When I am learning about something, such as history or politics, I try to keep an open mind to other theories and ways of looking at the world. I cannot be so prepared for my future that I know exactly what I will be doing in 10 years and then study only those things required to do that job. If I were too focused on what I needed to learn t
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Approximate Word count = 1797
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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