This is a question I’ve asked myself a few times over the years and consistently come up with the same answers.

Yes, we can be done with anything (or anyone or anyplace) when its time has come and gone.

No, passions don’t necessarily last forever (although they can…sometimes).

I’ll bet Harper Lee was passionate about To Kill a Mockingbird when she wrote it. The life after, not so much. To strive so hard to tell a story, certain it will be ridiculed but faced with praise and awards instead, seems like a dream come true. For Harper Lee, it was a horrible experience.

Another writer strives so hard to tell a story, hoping for praise and awards but receives ridicule…or even worse, is ignored. That too can be a horrible experience.

Either way, the passion is drowned by unacceptable and unintended consequences.

The ideas dry up. The story starts go nowhere. The writer walks away from the computer and heads for a walking trail with a new camera, or books a river boat cruise on the Rhine, or remodels the bathroom, or takes drumming lessons, or starts a business to sell her homemade handbags.

Is it any different from the surgeon who becomes discouraged with hospital politics and retires to his woodworking shop to handcraft dollhouses? Or the game software designer who throws in the towel and buys an urban farm to raise chickens, goats, and organic vegetables?

A passion is a passion until it’s not. That’s when it’s time to go do something else. Don’t worry about. It will come back, or it won’t. The notion that we only get one great passion in our lives and that we have to stick to it or die is just silly.

I’m getting older, and I have a lot of interests. I might want to make a change one of these days and “be done with” writing. It’s okay, because by then I’ll have a passion for something else. I already have a couple of ideas.