Me And My Swing

I spent some of my formative years in British Columbia, Canada. It was a small town called Victoria in Vancouver Island and we settled there because my father was a visiting scholar at the University of Victoria.

Life in Canada started out okay. My sister and I were small kids excited to try out speaking English in real life outside of some English extracurricular academies. Our parents enrolled us into a summer sports camp where for some reason SQUASH is the most memorable activity.

This summer activity wasn’t bad at all, English turned out to be kind of… Easy? I thought it’d be really hard in real life but I didn’t really find any difficulty in communication. So I anticipated that it would be the same at school, but trying to navigate an entirely different school system turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

Why though? I’m kind of sitting with myself as I think about why it was hard. I remember writing about my only Asian friend in Canada, Eric Chu, some while back but I think his presence sort of made it karmically difficult for me to adjust to this new environment.

If I had been the only Asian kid in the classroom I think I would have seen myself as one of the Canadians because there would have been no other option. But because Eric was there, AND I had a tendency to gravitate towards someone similar to me but more charismatic, I drew myself to Eric and became the second Asian kid after Eric.

Eric doesn’t owe me anything, so he didn’t really return my attachment. And I get it, it’s tough for a kid to be a babysitter for another kid. But for little Billy at the time it was difficult to feel included with the other kids now. I felt too Asian to be Canadian but too far from home to long for Korea.

So I started spending more and more time alone. And with that came a really strange side effect: I got REALLY good at riding the swing. You know, a playground swing.

A lot of the other playground props were used by other kids but there was always an empty swing in the set of swings. I started by just sitting there waiting for recess to end so I had something to do. Going back and forth and back and forth until one day boom! I found myself just ridiculously good at soaring through the sky.

Getting over loneliness was a lifelong experience for me but the ability to ride the swings was a lifelong gift. I can still soar through the air on any swing I can find. I always make it a point to ride on a swing whenever I find one and though it started with a sense of profound loneliness I actually forget about all of it when I hop on the swing and fly.

A set of swings in Taughannock Park, Ithaca, NY.

What prompted me to write about this today is my driving next to a playground with my wife yesterday. Kids usually suck at riding the swing (sorry kids, I’m a judgmental adult) but the kids we saw yesterday were mindblowingly good at riding and dare I say: almost as good as me when it comes to riding the swing.

Since I started writing emails I wrote 651 emails. I’d say this is a pretty big amount of emails I’ve written. Also I like to think that I write fairly earnestly about myself as I enjoy this process of revealing myself to you to learn more about me. But even with THIS many writings I think this is the first time I’ve talked about swings, which is actually a pretty important part of my life.

This goes to show you how much of our unconscious heart remains unexplored, even to ourselves. We live purely with our heads with minimal interaction from what actually drives our life, our hearts.

If you asked me what the biggest benefit is in living a life of practice, I would say it is my connection to myself. Knowing myself well makes it really easy for me to make myself happy. And how does one start this process of knowing oneself? My answer to that is writing and regardless of whether you’re an entrepreneur or a coaching client or whatever, I always recommend writing to start the journey of self-discovery.

But not just any writing, HEART BASED writing. You’re seeing an example of it in the above paragraphs. Learn and practice writing with your heart, using my 108 Writing Prompts. This is the product and methodology that gets my clients over writer’s blocks and fear of commitments. Start writing with my proven process and watch your internal landscape change!