Half of the things I did this year are things that I never imagined that I could do.

Almost all of the things I did this year were things I thought I never would do.

But I did them anyway.

If that’s not evidence that a soul can transform, I’m really not sure what is.

Have you ever watched your own soul transform, reflected on the things that you’ve done in the past year and considered how they affected your soul, your thought process, the way that you behave and think in this world?

I have.

I’ve witnessed ways in which my own personality has changed, how I’ve tried and performed many different things that I never even imagined that I’d try – musical instruments, new languages, new forms of business, writing books…

It’s been fascinating to watch, even if I don’t entirely know where all of it is going.

Still, this year, I’ve come to pay a deeper homage to nature and the gifts that it gives – the way that the soul reaches out from the confines that are beyond it to seek out things that align with it in a grand exercise by which somehow or another, it seeks its natural position and flourishes; like a flower that blooms in the midst of the radiance of sunlight, it is only natural that it should do so.

The human psyche is a complicated thing – so muddled, so chaotic, so filled with random things that a person might never be able to even appreciate in the course of a lifetime; I would certainly know – each time I close my eyes and begin to think about a space beyond, I find myself confronted with a hundred different thoughts that pass through like light trails on a highway, whizzing by as blurs that only take coherent form when you look at them to reflect upon what had come, knowing them only in retrospect.

I’m reminded now of the Steve Jobs commencement speech – about how the man could only see what had happened when he had looked back at his life and everything that had come by.

I don’t know the answer to what I’ll see when I personally look back, but what I do know is that well, it’ll probably be pretty interesting – so I’m glad for the ride to continue 🙂

It’s always been a little weird for me to talk about education and why I’m passionate about it, especially because I’m an Economics graduate – to say the very least, this isn’t the field or area that many people would’ve thought that I would specialize in.

I imagine that many people looked at me when I graduated and wondered – why would he want to go into education?

Well, the reason I do this all is simple: I’m just doing justice to my nature.

For one thing, I really enjoy learning new things and building up stores of knowledge; it’s something that I can literally do all day as I pick up new and interesting tricks, figure out things left, right, front, and center, and learn how to implement them inside my head.

That aside, I also enjoy understanding how to convey information in clear and easily comprehensible ways and leveling up my skill in doing so.

Lastly, educating people is a joy – it’s interesting to watch how people respond to my words and to teach them how to expose themselves to more advanced material while at the same time building their capabilities.

In my eyes, there is a strange beauty in knowing that every effort that you’re making to develop yourself will one day translate into developing the lives of other people around you and the way that they think and make decisions…

Yet at the same time I can’t help but feel that there’s always a bit of hubris along the way.

After all, the weird thing about talking about education is that it always involves talking about how well someone else has learned, when at the end of the day, the only thing that we can really speak about is the extent to which we have personally learned.

At the end of the day…

How can we really say how much we have learned? It’s kind of hard to do that, I think, especially since a person can go through the entire course of their lives but never really get a sense of who they are and what they’re about; even if a person spends all their time thinking and writing and reflecting, they may come no closer to the answer than they were before.

Having said that, though, I think I’m personally a little closer to the answer than I used to be many years ago – heavy on my thoughts, after all, is the constant recognition that I’m learning and growing as a person, a constant sense of appreciation and need, and the joy of knowing that the people whom I’ll see on a day to day basis are somehow glad to see me.

Do I know how they’ve changed as people, though?

In some ways, yes I guess; I can see the ways that their grades have improved and how that aspect of their lives has improved, and I can see the ways in which my thoughts have lent themselves into the reflections of my students.

Beyond that, though, how can I look inside another person’s mind and see what they see, what they feel, witness the foundation of their thoughts?

I guess I can’t – but it doesn’t stop this from being something that’s endlessly fascinating for me, as I bear witness to the work of my own hands in ways that I never imagined before, both on the battlefield of the exam world, and also in life at large 🙂