Passion or Project?
/What do you hope to gain from this? Why are you spending so much time/money on this? Is this really worth all the effort?
“It’s what non-car people don’t get. They see all cars as just ton and a half, two tons of wires, glass, metal and, rubber. That’s all they see. People like you or I know, we have an unshakable belief that cars are living entities. You can develop a relationship with a car. And that’s just what non-car people don’t get.
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What gets you excited? What gets your heart racing and maybe even a cheeky embarrassing smile on your face. What guides your mind towards certain times of the day or perhaps certain days of the week? Think about it for a second! Please don’t say NETFLIX! Of course, passion can take you into film and television, but i want us to go a bit deeper than watching a sociopathic hottie stalk and kill people to be with the one he loves. Okay, wait… we are talking about passion and we have to agree that Netflix has got some guys with killer PASSION!
Anyway, back to reality, we’re here thinking about what makes us stir. Some people define passion as unmistakeable and excessive. If you have it, everyone will see it. It is a such a strong emotion towards something that it cannot simply be contained. It can be art, education, spirituality, sports or anything of the sort. For most readers here, your passion lies within the four wheels in your garage, understandably so.
As car enthusiasts, some of you readers might be asked the same questions posted at the outset. And as most of you would recall, it isn’t always easy to answer such questions, especially to someone who doesn’t share your passion towards cars and their culture. So I guess that’s what it really comes down to; PASSION. The question arises, then, is passion something you are born with or something that develops within you.
“Passion : Intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction”
I would like to think that I am a passionate person. Let me rephrase, I am a passionate person. I love to express it and see it being expressed in as many different ways as I possibly can, open to any new avenues that make themselves available to me. A fish that swims in all oceans, so to speak. I love love love the arts; music, dance, movies. I learned languages because language is also another way to express passion, why would I want to enjoy passion in only English when Spanish tingles my ear and French gets my heart burning. Books are another thing I am passionate about, escape to Victorian England or in a land that only exists in the imagination, what a beautiful way to express passion.
“I was brought up in a car family, my dad loved cars and I was taught the art of making an Austin 7 operate.”
But even I can admit that this wasn’t always the case, so does that mean that my passions have been developed? Were they born or bred? I was born into a household that had shelves upon shelves of DVDs, different genres, different time periods, all beautiful. So being exposed to such, I was able to develop a love for them, so did my siblings who grew up in the same household. So in my opinion, BRED - 1 BORN - 0, easy enough! However, I do have this appetite for learning languages, which none of my family members seem to share. I studied them in school for years, I even visited different countries to immerse myself in these languages simply because I had this innate and inexplicable love for them. Looking at it this way, it can be concluded that this wasn’t developed per se; does that mean that I was born with it? Perhaps. So based on this level footing of my passions as it stands in my life, one can be born with these desires or inclinations towards certain things, or it can be taught or developed by one’s surroundings. Fair enough.
Another interesting factor to note is that passions are sometimes developed by being within a certain surrounding environment. Perhaps you like to play basketball and there is a basketball court right opposite an entertainment race track. The heavy vroom of the cars might startle you at first and then you realise you’re becoming more and more interested in analysing each one. Was it the iconic Subaru? Or perhaps someone with a worked up Mitsubishi Lancer. You start to develop a slight passion for car culture just by physically being in a surrounding area. So even though things you’re passionate about may be nearby other things you become interested in, they may also overlap. Let me give you an example.
Intro: “Kashaya King”, new adition to thE ‘Sleeper forest’ team
Passion in Travel
“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.”
In the past, my brain would never linger on anything about cars besides perhaps their colour. But once I dust off some cobwebs in the long term memory file, I remember. I remember, a young girl who acted like a tom boy that played video games for entire summers and knew the names of every car in ‘Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2’ and ‘Gran Turismo 3’ for Playstation 2. It’s amazing that in my preteen years I seemingly had a passion for video games and fast cars. I remember the Supras and the Corvettes, outrunning the unrealistically fast police chasing me in the games. Even sometimes playing as the cops, or splitting the screen and playing against my cousin or sisters (yes sisters, not brothers). I remember choosing the exact car as my cousin because i didn’t know the difference and then being able to rattle off the slight variations in cars as the summer went along. I remember messing up the driving test in Gran Turismo right at the end and mistakenly pulling down the entire playstation because the remote was physically connected back in those days. Oh wow, I just got one of those cheeky embarrassing smiles simply thinking about the good times I had on those car games. I definitely can’t forget the short gameplay in ‘007 Nightfire’ on that beautiful grey Aston Martin, it was one of my favourite levels.
Now that i can take a breather from me fan-girling my own memories, I can relate that maybe I do have a slight passion for cars, untapped in recent years, but it’s there. What a relief!
SIDE STORY
This colour is appropriately called “porsche speed yellow”.
A Proper English Summer Car Ride: This is a brief story of the beautiful Porsche
I have a friend in the middle of England that I visited in the middle of 2018. I was visiting this part of the country for only the weekend and spent some time admiring this car from the window. At this time my friend, who we’ll call ‘T’ was actively driving the shimmering black one and I was just drawn to it and so of course I had to ask some questions.
Both of these belong to the same englishman
Apparently he that buys a new car ever so often and fixes it up for resale! Marvelous right? Buy a beautiful, fast luxury car, fix it up and make a profit, all the while being able to enjoy the beauty and the speed in the meantime. Sounds like a fool proof plan to me.
So being suddenly interested in cars and wanting to at least get one ride in it before travelling back to London, T took me on a ‘what should have been longer' than it was’ journey to get a smell of fresh air from the front seat of a luxury car. I took a fast ride in this in the middle of the summer 2018 and I regret nothing. I must say, I was never very interested in going fast before but that ride was thrilling, ‘Ford V Ferarri’ level of awesome. It was chilly outside and we were on the way to get fish and chips, I kid you not, sounds quite cliché but we were really on our way to buy fish and chips in middle of England.
I still remember the looks on peoples faces when we parked on the side of the road and got out to enter this tiny shop on the roadside. If envy had a facial expression then I’ve seen it. It’s not hard to imagine why so many people would see that car and wish it could be them jumping out.Unfortunately, I don’t have any fancy inside information on these cars but maybe I can write a full story of them in a later article. To think that I’m not a real car person but I was able to recognise and enjoy the beauty of this car and the story of it’s owner. This beautiful memory is printed onto my brain as bright as the sun shining off of the polished coats of this Porshe and I LOVE IT.
“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.”
BACK TO THE MAIN EVENT.
Books in Spanish
Some might be wondering up till now, why am I writing about random passions on a blog space for car enthusiasts. But the truth is, and I admit this with a heavy heart, I’m writing on a car blog with limited information on modern car culture. As you would have seen from this article, I know nothing beyond what a normal young adult woman would know. But this whole idea of passion being born or bred makes me wonder. It makes me think about the possibility of being a real “car enthusiast” in the future, from the streets of whatever the street was called in PS2 games to the streets of whatever street you’re reading this from.
Thinking of all this is a bit overwhelming but I remember the words of a famous German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche who said “Without music life would be a mistake”. Do you agree? Perhaps not, this isn’t a blog about music no doubt, but still passion is passion. Wherever yours is, whether you have found it or yet searching, life really is a mistake without it. Even though, car culture may never overwrite the place in my heart where listening to a perfectly synchronised Orchestra playing Beethovan is, I do believe there is space in my heart for overlapping and equally intriguing passions.
So welcome to my thoughts. By the end of the year I think we will all know from my writing on this space whether the “Caribbean car culture” has become my passion or if it will remain a well balanced project. Maybe it comes as something of a meeting in the middle, a passion project, if you will. Something I do in my spare time, even perhaps making time for it, in order to obtain some benefits, or some elusive expression of passion. So i guess we shall see.
