Hello all,
Oh yes, I did warn you, didn't I? That my blog would be the first thing to suffer my return to teaching and my wild plunge into curating for TEDxKyoto?
Yes, I did warn you. So you really can't look at me like that.
For the past 3 days or so I have been trying to reassemble my brain and life after having it run amok thanks to my foray into being Head Curator for TEDxKyoto 2013.
The event was last Sunday, the 29th. I arrived at the venue at 7:45am and I fell out of the taxi onto my front step somewhere around 9:30pm.
And not to brag, but it was FANTASTIC. The speakers and performers were wonderful and rose to the challenge of getting on that stage in front of nearly 700 people. All of the volunteer teams (somewhere around 150-200 people) worked their tailfeathers off. And the after party was a great success, with plenty of food and drink, and plenty of happy people.
So if you ask me if this past year was worth it, I'd have to say absolutely. Putting this event together involved a LOT of late nights, both in meetings and on the computer. It involved stretching my skills into areas I had never explored before--not just as a writer and editor, but negotiating speeches and travel plans, hotel reservations and transportation issues, endless graphs, charts and tables as I organized reams of information, speaker data and event schedules. It involved working back and forth between Japanese and English with the switches between the languages often stumbling over each other.
However during the after party, when I was fielding a baffling number of audience members congratulating me, I couldn't in all good conscience accept the kind words.
Because I didn't--and never could have--done it alone. I may have been Head Curator, but an event like this takes a team. In this case a team of nearly 200 volunteers.
Come to think of it, most things in life require a team to make them work. And perhaps those things that we always assume are best done alone, might be the very things that would benefit the most from being backed up by a great team.
The overused saying is best folks: no one is an island.
Although after the past year...and especially after Sunday, I sure would like to be on an island somewhere, basking on the beach.
Until next time...
