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What is Your Life’s Work?
My fascination with great human achievements started from an early age.
If I were to retrace its origins, my footsteps in memory would lead back to a book my father bought me in my early teens titled, “The Ones that Came Before Us.”
I can’t remember much about what the book looked like or what it said, but what is unforgettable were the pencil drawings in the book — something that appealed strongly to the young artist in me. They were drawings of the historic characters whose life stories were told in the book, and boy wasn’t I inspired.
I wanted to be like these people. I wanted to be great.
Coming from a childhood that bordered on precocious, I could draw, paint, sing, and play musical instruments and I passed every subject in class topping my class until it seemed a normal thing to do. I didn’t see why I couldn’t be like them.
Seeing that the people featured in The Ones That Came Before Us were from diverse backgrounds and fields made me a little more optimistic. At the time, skin color was not a consideration in my evaluation of status or circumstance neither was Death a familiar notion. So, it didn’t matter that there were no Africans like me in the line-up or that all the people whose stories were being told were dead.
