“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age”.. (James Joyce) I’ve often been accused of being too passionate, of caring too much about certain things. But I believe that passion, also defined as fervor or zeal, is one of the essential core values of human life, along with the Apostle Paul’s Biblical list of the virtues of faith, hope and charity. Passionate people have strong opinions and usually articulate them very well. We are also perfectionists, and we don’t handle incompetence in the public arena very well, all of which tend to preclude us from being the most popular person in the room. I long ago accepted the fact that I won’t have the largest funeral in Lebanon, nor will my obituary make the front page. But not everyone seems to care that much about anything other than their own lives. T.S. Eliot once said, “It is obvious that we can no more explain passion to a person who has never experienced i