Thursday, August 14, 2008

The World Beyond

There are a lot of great places and lot of good people all over the world — and not just those living in Hawaii.

These days, it really doesn’t matter where you actually live because everybody now lives everywhere they want to live; that’s what “communities” are about in this day and age. You belong to the community you want to belong to — and not just have to fit in because everybody tells you that’s how it’s going to be, and so the only thing anybody can do in that society, is wait for one of the elders to die so everybody can move up.

That’s the mentality starting to overtake the Islands now — as a lot of the baby boom generation wait and bide their time for the previous generation to pass on. But with life expectancies now approaching the 90s, they may be too old themselves to be able to make something of their lives then.

So when you have that inclination to change and try something different (better), you have to grab it and run with that feeling, or that vital spark dies in you — as it has in many living in Hawaii, who actually fear to try live elsewhere — but complain endlessly about their “paradise.”

That’s not what paradise is.

Undoubtedly, these are tough times to live in the Islands, which has not always been that way. At times, it has been the undiscovered bargain -- even as recently as 2002 -- marking a turn to good fortune brought about by the resurgence of tourism in the Islands and the stability and prosperity of the world all over. But that also creates its own problems of what to do with that success. Many people, instead of appreciating their good fortune, simply become more greedy -- which is the surest way to undermine and destroy whatever good fortunate a society encounters.

So then it takes many years of wandering through the wilderness before they come across good fortune again.

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