For the longest time, art & design was my sole motivation. From the practical standpoint of my own practice to the theoretical practice of how to teach it to my students. Art and design is an enormously complex discipline covering domains of knowledge from drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, digital art, and crafts. In addition, creativity is a discipline in itself; it doesn’t just automatically come from doing art; it has to be fostered and developed through the kinds of activities you teach. I was a national expert in my field. I wrote books on it. I lived, ate, and breathed my job. So much so that my family didn’t believe I could give it up. But when it was time to, I did it willingly and easily, and I haven’t looked back. 

What motivates me now? Writing motivates me, especially writing about the spiritual, philosophical, and educational life journey I am on. I feel like I am trying to catch up on a lot of learning I missed out on. My own education was quite poor in comparison to the high standards of education found in public schools, and I’ve always felt like I missed out. I was a bright kid, but I wasn’t taught the rigours of the classics, languages, music, philosophy, science, or literature. I dodged school during most of my exams and went into studying art because I’d failed everything else, and it feels to me like a whole world of knowledge is missing. 

While my early education didn’t live up to my expectations, what I do have is an insatiable curiosity and lifelong thirst for knowledge. Over the years, I’ve crammed a lot of stuff that I missed at school, and tried to understand many things that evaded me. Of course, you never get to the end of knowledge. There’s always something else to learn and I know there are so many things that I’ve missed. What keeps motivating me is my continuous fascination with the world around me. It is so spellbinding, so incredible, so complex, and so profoundly enigmatic. While it seems at times that knowledge is elusive, and beyond the understanding of mere mortals, the truth of life is simple. We have to love and to be loved. This sounds easy enough, but it’s not. To love in the face of so much prejudice, hostility, cruelty, pain and injustice is so difficult. To allow ourselves to be loved is surprisingly difficult too. I just hope that the people whose lives I have touched along the way will say that I spread some love in their direction. That I was kind, and that I helped them. Ultimately, I think that means a whole lot more than a bunch of facts I wasn’t taught properly in the first place.