My 2010: Being an integrated person again

We are five boys in my family. I remember the story of how we came to be so many boys… my Mom and Dad were trying to have a girl, so when my Mom got pregnant, they would think “we will have no more kids once we have a girl”. So time went by, and they had a boy, then they had two, then they had three. Four and five were pretty much “this time, we’ll definitely have a girl – we have had so many boys, the next one for sure is a girl”. No such luck, but they got their basketball team alright.

While growing up, my parents always saw us as little diamonds in the rough. The kids who would make a difference in the world. It was (I believe, in my parents’ mind) their mission to create agents of change and to make of their creations, the best they could. So, my parents invested their time and money in their children. They gave us an incredibly broad array of opportunities. The only two conditions they ever placed on us were that we were to do everything to the best of our ability, and that we would be integral (e.g. that we wouldn’t just excel in ONE thing, but that we would strive to excel in EVERYTHING we did).

We (all five) took it upon ourselves to do what our parents wanted us and allowed us to do. We became artists (my brothers play concert-level piano, whereas I trained to be a competitive dancer), sportsmen (my brothers played competitive basketball while I played volleyball, martial arts and tennis), scientists (my brothers and I are all engineers, with two having Masters degrees and three of us have PhDs) and humanitarians (my brothers have volunteered in a broad variety of things, while I did mostly adult literacy, and recently, cancer, HIV and mental health causes).

As I have grown in other fields, traveled and lived in many countries, made new friends and established new relationships (romantic, business and collaborative), I have invested a lot of my time in other things that haven’t given me the rounded, integrated feeling. The most recent time I felt an integrated (integral?) person was 2006-2007 when I was doing competitive volleyball and still teaching salsa while doing my academic and consulting work.

2008 was a pivotal year for me. I grew in the social media sphere and as a person, I solidified friendships, and my blog became substantially more popular. 2009 has also been pivotal in my growth in the teaching and consulting spheres. Now, 2010 needs to be the year where I grow again into my old self – an integrated person who can be an artist, a humanitarian, a scientist and a sportsman. I’m working on that as I write this, and I look forward to 2010.

Related posts:

1. Win tickets to Black Grace at the Vancouver International Dance Festival #VIDF
2. Out with the old, in with the new
3. My 2010: Going back to competitive volleyball
4. My 2010: Dancing
5. My yyjWordCamp talk on integrated socmed WP site building