Alienation is a killer, passion brings life

Alienation

It's a lifestyle made up of choices that make you ask yourself, 'What's happened to my life?' and drives you to identify too closely with Radiohead-style self-evaluation:

What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here

I'm not here, this isn't happening

I've had that job. The feeling that you're ONLY doing it so that you've got enough money to pay the bills that you have to pay. Futility. You run from it, grab a bestseller to read on the bus or listen to your favourite music - can't hack reading the news about how yet another politician is corrupt or how another billionaire has just bought another profit-making venture - just switch of the panic alarm in your head for another day.

Passion

We say to teenagers: 'You decide what you really want to do with your life. It's up to you,' but often catch ourselves wondering why we haven't taken our own advice. Perhaps I made too many mistakes, I missed all my golden opportunities and life passed me by...

Except it didn't. Our passions are still intact, still nagging at us from behind the bestseller or from beyond our distracting songs.

I still love working in education. I love it when I see people gaining faith in themselves and learning how to better exploit their talents. But I realised that not all education allows you to see that.

I also discovered far too late that I'm extraordinarily passionate about Africa. Sounds a bit vague, I know. It's a huge continent with much more variety than Europe. All the same, the more I learn about the different peoples - the thousands of languages, the cultures, the stories, the traditions, the vision, the art, the cuisine, the lifestyles, the complexity and the simplicity - the more the passion in me.

We could be superheroes

I've met real superheroes from Africa. No exaggeration: people who have crawled through hell with absolute determination that they were going to make it out the other side. That's not figurative, I mean hell like most of us can't begin to imagine.

I'm so lucky I still have passion. I'm so lucky I can see living role-models of unfailing determination. I'm so lucky that, when I used to sit on that bus on dark, wet mornings, I felt like my life had become a Radiohead album and I was horrified.

Thank God for being horrified.