Possibly like you, the slightly strange formative years left me with more questions than answers.

A poorly managed education system while not extinguishing the desire to learn closed down options and left them closed. The struggle was to find meaning and make sense of it all. I found myself in among millions of others, none of whom seemed especially enlightened and all of us aboard a runaway train heading towards nowhere.

Feeling completely disenfranchised I used to skip school, visit galleries and museums, wander derelict industrial areas and walk along the banks of canals. I was fortunate in that the city I grew up in had a rich cultural and industrial heritage. The paintings and sculptures were doors through which I entered a different world. The words of philosophers and writers towered above the wasteland like beacons and showed me a way out.

Using various means I made good my escape as soon as possible.

I needed wisdom, knowledge, a guidance system to plot a course through life. I was on my own and trying desperately to find a way to get into the palace of opportunities that I sensed was all around. To me it was invisible, something I knew had to exist but was unable to divine a path towards. I looked everywhere I could think of, I travelled, I spoke, I read, I attended lectures, courses, tried every handle on every door in an attempt to progress further.

It is a little like escaping from a concentration camp. An escapee imagines that everyone knows who they are, what they are thinking and what they are trying to achieve. So they spend their time in hiding or trying to obscure their motives from this imagined cabal whose objective is to thwart their bid for freedom. All our experiences are conditioning, they define the people we are and that we become.

And then, many decades later, I realised that I was out. I had escaped and there was clear blue water between that person and this. All the things I had sought I found, all the questions had answers and the confusion was replaced with clarity, understanding and perception. I came to love wisdom, and I came to love the human race because it too was lost and confused, just as I had been.

I began to work with children and young people who were like I had been. Only now I saw them through different eyes, I had empathy and compassion for them. They did not, as I had not, understand their situation so they raged against the machine. They were angry with the system, the world and a structure they perceived as conspiring against them. It became clear to me that these young people were the peripheral extremes of what passes through most of us.

Of course I did the usual things, I pitched in and helped where I could, spoke with them, befriended them, made no judgement and worked with what was there. But I realised that my own journey had covered so much territory that I wanted to give back something more. If the questions that bothered me bothered them, and they did, then I would offer the fruits of my own journey in order to alleviate some of the stresses and pressures people feel under. So I wrote a series of books addressing these questions.

Our world is a curious place, a dichotomy; while there is electric light and running water on the one hand, there is a deficit on the other. The human qualities, those naturally attendant characteristics of a meaningful and purposeful life, a life well lived are in shortfall. It is these areas that the Mechanics of Happiness covers; the book is a simple conversation between the author and the reader. It makes no judgement and offers a cascade of perceptions to illuminate the way forward and enable the reader to piece together a structure of their own.