What Drives You?

You are a very busy person. We all are.

24 hours a day and seven days a week just don't seem enough for all the things you would want to do. Actually, you feel like whatever time you do have to spend is actually for something or someone else but never for you. What you need to spend your precious time on could be office work, a plate, your thesis, a project or an errand and it never seems to be for watching a movie you would want to see or getting that haircut you really need.

The strange thing is that you've probably become so accustomed to this kind of "set up" that you find this to be "normal". You are simply busy and that is that.

But has it ever occured to you why you are as "busy" as you are?

Just what is it that drives you? What is the force that animates your very being?

What is it that lets you become capable of skipping meals or staying awake at ungodly hours just to finish whatever it is you're "busy with" at the present? What makes you pass at spending time with your friends and loved ones or deprive yourself of something "good" and become a martyr for your chosen profession?

Admit it, architecture has got you by the neck and poor old you has no clue as to why.

You don't know.

I don't know.

Chances are most of us don't, and yet we persist, there's a million of us living each day like this with nary a thought as to why.

A song by the group "The Corrs" offers the explanation that it's simply because we're "so young" that "it really doesn't matter if we never eat.... if we never sleep....".

Well, some of us are, some of us were and most of us would want to just stay that way but I'm guessing that the real answer is not as simple as that.

Most of us probably think we had the answer before when we first decided to indoctrinate ourselves in college into the seemingly wonderful world of architecture. We were all like golden ticket winners in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory minus the benefit of Oompa Loompa's singing the "lessons" we needed to learn.

"Remember all the cut and paste answers as to why we thought of becoming architects?

Because we used to play with Legos.......

Because it is both art and science which is perfect because I want to be an "artist" but I also want to do something "scientific".......

Because my parents said so...............

Because I'll become rich................"

Well, if you've actually spent time trying to become or already are an architect, you would know that cut and paste answers simply don't make the grade.

Playing with Legos is more fun than architecture, art is more beautiful and science is more logical than architecture, you really don't want to live your life through your parent's decision and want to make your own and you've yet to see that million dollar paycheck.

Somehow our reasons for doing what it is we do as disciples of architecture has changed from what it initially was. The thing is, the change probably happened so fast that we failed to realize that it did change and that we no longer know what it is.

It might not even have changed but simply got lost along the way. Our fuel is spent and we are simply idling away.

Well whatever our reasons, we are still somehow managing going through the "daily grind" be it for some form of love, money, both, neither or an entirely different thing altogether.

It would be good to be able to stop the world for a few seconds to catch our breath and think about this real hard and be able to answer these questions truthfully to a satisfactory degree for ourselves.

It seems only reasonable to ask ourselves where we want to go because most of us are simply running full speed ahead with architecture as our compass but never really knowing or maybe forgetting what made us start to run in the first place.

We might want to find out about how far we are willing to go or even if it is really necessary to be running at all.

Maybe we just need to stop, or maybe we are running fast but we are not running fast enough.