The things that keep ME going
are people and play
and art and nature.
i am one who tries. For many years, I have been training to be a husband and a father. The path is tough though, and I realize that I am not anywhere near to being in a position that I can claim to have found the golden recipe to earning stripes in either field. My secret hope is that playfulness and reflection will turn out to be among the coveted keys to excellence – although it is getting the look of it that letting go might be the better way. Sadly, play and reflection are what I think I am rather good at, while letting go is a much, much harder task.
I have gone places too. Hailing from the clay on the coastal flatlands near the Franco-Belgian border, with the white cliffs of Dover calling on the horizon, when I was old enough to answer that call and set sail, the voyage brought me further than I could have imagined. For near to twenty years, I lived in India and Sri Lanka - doing research for a PhD, trying to be a Buddhist monk, aspiring to be a Sanskrit teacher, and writing the first few sentences of a good one hundred imaginary books. This taught me a few lessons of life, the relative values of aspiration and attempt not being the least among them.
Remembering my grandmother say that “if you can’t, then teach,” I ventured into education, where I experimented with making up for my lack of professionalism by telling everybody that professionalism is overrated and one should in fact be oneself – and if one must, shockingly and brazenly and provokingly so. I was pulled to working with the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, the “unteachables” - and ended up understanding that in the end all of us are in the same boat. This was when friends started calling me names, like somewhat weird and non-conventional, while professionally I became known as a proponent of the Agile movement, a designer for social change, a teacher of teachers, a coach of coaches, and a facilitator of facilitators, working with educators in the social field, the arts, and a variety of industrial sectors.
I now live in Singapore, where I love teaching and working, the tropical weather, the greenery of its urban space, the diversity of its people, the closeness to large stretches of real jungle, and the happenstance of being in the very heart of Southeast Asia.
My favorite pastimes are being (alone and with you), breathing, hillwalking, painting, reading, writing, and playing the guzheng.
