2/27/10: Shifting Ground

Today I went to Kailua, the teeming tropical resort city. I went pursuing illusions of grandeur and shapeless visions of happiness and beautiful faces. But I found streets of pale and ungainly white people, shielding themselves from the sun. There were not rows of shadowy bungalows, but rather strips of shopping malls. It is nearsighted though, to look at the trip as a failure, since I did not find what I wanted. From every experience we can extract wisdom, and even if I have to wince through hours, I carry the antidote through the future forever. I wanted something so badly simply because it was what I was not, it was the glistening grass on the other side of the fence, it was the illusion of happiness we all pursue. Truly, I am learning that what makes us happy is what we cannot have. Here I am in paradise looking for something greater.

Anyways, when the crew and I returned from Kailua, all four of us, we found the two new workers waiting at the hostel. As delighted as I was to make two more friends, all night I could not suppress my feelings of insecurity. What if they eat all the food? What if they use my shower stall? What trivial things to worry about, I know. The abrupt shock of two new bodies in this space shook the ground beneath me, I realized, because it is a fifty percent growth in our population. After crawling so deep inside myself, the call of only two others draws me back to the surface.