Live Passionately! That's what the billboard said that I spotted while driving through the Commonwealth of Virginia on my way to the Outer Banks of North Carolina last week. Live Passionately! Amen, billboard-writer! I'm trying. So hard, in fact, that I bought an anklet while I was down there for luck. It's so silly, I'm sure, but the display said that I should purchase the anklet whose color corresponds with the wish I have, with what I want. I chose purple for passion. When this trinket that I tied onto my ankle falls off, my wish will be granted. Wish oh wish...wish I may, wish I might...

The fact is that pretty much all I want in life is to live passionately. It's who I am. It's who Anakin Skywalker was too, and it's why he suffered the way he did.

Anakin's passions took hold of him long before we met him in The Phantom Menace. By that time, this young boy was well aware of his abilities, even though they defied any explanation his young mind could come up with. He used them to his advantage, though, as he became a skilled pod racer, famously good at fixing things. I'm not just talking about the Force; I'm talking about the force that guided Anakin's force. Anakin was much more than a conduit of the midichlorians he was blessed (or cursed?) with. Force powers aside, Anakin Skywalker was a passionate person. Everything he felt, he felt deeply, and every emotion he had, had to be expressed. It's ironic, really, that such a person was also the Chosen One, trapped in a way of life that didn't allow his passions to even exist let alone guide him.

Instead, Anakin was forced to subvert the very stuff that made him who he was. And we wonder why he became Darth Vader? Imagine all of those feelings, all of those emotions, all of the raw passion that Anakin was made of, unexpressed and eating at him from the inside out. Pain. Passion's pain. Hidden by necessity because of the rules that governed the old Jedi Order. Had Anakin been able and allowed to express himself, had he been able to freely love his mother and love Padme, if he had been given the opportunity to truly be a father even for a moment, Darth Vader might never have existed, and the GFFA would have been spared his atrocities and might have known the true power of the Force long before it did.

In my own life, I struggle with the passions that guide me and know that leaving them unexpressed can be a dangerous thing. Fortunately for me, I possess neither the powers of a Jedi nor the weight of title of the Chosen One.