What are you passionate about?
My passions have always been broad and shifting.
I am passionate about stories, whether they come from people, places, diaries, photographs, landscapes or old documents, diaries or letters. Much of what I do involves trying to understand how lives are lived and remembered. A faded school photograph, a veteran oak, a First World War service record, a childhood diary entry, a family anecdote, or a forgotten woodland path can all open doors into larger stories waiting to be told.
I am passionate about learning. I always have been. Geography led me into history; history into education; education into communications; communications into filmmaking; filmmaking into digital learning; and somewhere along the way, I became a swim coach, a tree surveyor, a town councillor, a writer and a blogger. I have never been very good at staying in one lane.
I am passionate about swimming, though perhaps not in the way competitive swimmers often are. I love the water itself: rivers, lakes, lidos, pools and seas. I love the discipline of training, the camaraderie of clubs, and the privilege of helping young swimmers discover what they can achieve.
I am passionate about trees. Not just as objects of beauty, but as living witnesses. An ancient oak may have stood in the same place for four or five centuries, surviving wars, storms, changing fashions and changing politics. To stand beside such a tree is to be reminded how brief our own lives are and yet how connected we remain to the generations that came before.
I am passionate about creativity. Writing, drawing, filmmaking, blogging, storytelling, and now exploring AI-assisted visualisation all spring from the same impulse: the desire to make something from imagination and experience that did not exist before.
Most of all, perhaps, I am passionate about curiosity. The desire to know how things work, why people behave as they do, what happened here before I arrived, and what story lies behind the next door, the next photograph, the next conversation or the next page of a diary.
At sixty-four, I have discovered that enthusiasm is not something you grow out of. If anything, it becomes more valuable. The world remains astonishingly interesting, and there is still far more to learn than there is time to learn it.
Leave a Reply