|| Return to On The Road... ||
August 30, 1996
Waikiki
There's a thing about visiting an island. Life slooows way down. People look up at the sun and relax. Sure, that's the vacationers, but island people live there for a reason.
Or maybe that's my myth. But walking beneath the full moon of a Waikiki beach, watching the sand sift through my toes as the waves caressed the beach, only to flow out once again, it's hard not to slow down. Even for a one generation removed New Jersey resident who still glows at night from toxic waste dumps and the drive drive drive of the metropolitan area.
Yes, I like visiting the beach but my heart lives on the highway. Now people are calling it the information superhighway, but visiting Hawaii for a workshop makes you think about working. What makes us want to run around, battle for jobs, getting tidal waved by downsizing and reengineering, struggling to keep up the battle, when we could just slow down.
Maybe I was just taught to work too hard. As if I can't succeed unless I feel the pain. No pain, no gain, right?
Wrong! Walking under this full moon with my wife (wow that word still weirds me out, we've only been married a month), I had to slow down. Tough life, huh? But slowing down is what it's all about, finding that space to give yourself not to work, not to stress, not to try an control the ever living roller coaster of life.
No matter what you do, it goes up and down. So I ask you, are you working hard or hardly working? Or as my friend's grandfather in England puts it, are you living to work, or working to live?
People who live on islands always have these sayings. People who don't live on islands always have the race. Between the racing and relaxing is a happy medium. I'm hardly working as I lay here, looking out over the placid ocean. But I am working, because I'm writing this journal. Not bad work, but the only way I got it was realizing that all the hard work in the world didn't get me where I am.
Learning how to not work hard, how to relax, and how to fit my work hours around my leisure. Appreciation of not working, of pleasure, instead of duty to a painful existence of work. I still work and put in my hours, but in my head, I'll always be walking along this full moon beach in Hawaii, or with my hybrid wolves in the woods. It's all in the attitude.
Islands have a way of teaching you that.