Lost Passion?

It's the holiday season and many of us are racking our brains for the perfect gift ideas.  For the past several years, my husband and I have enjoyed the fun Black Friday shopping adventures.  This year, we both felt the tradition of Christmas shopping was ruined.  Many retailers moved their big post Thanksgiving store openings to Thanksgiving night.  This sparked a controversy still being debated to this day- have retailers gone too far?  Have we, as a society, lost the meaning of what Christmas is really about? Has Christmas really been degraded to the latest technology gadgets and materialistic items?

This ambivalence about the holiday spirit has also been felt in other areas of my life, particularly affecting my feelings towards pole dancing.  Somewhere along my journey, I have lost my passion.  I began to feel myself pull away from social networking within the pole community.  The community was becoming too chaotic to keep up with.  A lot of dramatics and cliques forming.  I felt a tension within the community and decided it was best to let things settle over time.  I also began to witness more emphasis on dancers pushing themselves to be better than what they were.  A constant feeling of inadequacy and low moral. I no longer wanted to support those feelings of not being good enough.  I felt the compassion for being good regardless of what extreme tricks that could be done was lacking.  I took a break for awhile from paying attention to what was going on.  Over time, I began to lose passion within my own dancing.  Through my loss of passion, I feel a disconnection that I don't know if I will ever rekindle.  I no longer dance with my pole, nor do I feel at this moment in time I want to.  The thought has crossed my mind to give up pole dancing completely, sell my poles, and move on.  I have always thought of myself as being in a relationship with my pole.  Is this the end of my five year commitment?  I'm not certain about anything.  I feel myself disinterested in pole in regards to specific areas but immediately drawn back to people I have grown to know and love through our similar passion.  Maybe it's not an ending for me and my pole?  Maybe it's time to sit down and reflect on the meaning of pole- the same reflection many of us are experiencing as we try to bring back meaning to our beloved holiday season.  I guess only time will tell. And in time, I do have a bit of hope that there will be a story for time to tell.