WHAT DOES IT MATTER?

Travel & Tropical Islands

My Love for Travel

On my first trip to Europe, I fell in love with travel. New experiences were embraced, enjoyed, and I quickly learned to never fear them. But what I mostly treasured was how similar we all are, no matter where in the world we come from. We are a true global village, with a multitude of dialects, delicacies, and desires unique to each corner of this village – but complementary to the whole. Two quotes succinctly capture my love for travel:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
~Mark Twain

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
~ St. Augustine

Why Islands?

A glance at much of my imagery reveals an obvious love for tropical islands. My Southern California roots account for some of this, of course, but how did islands become my passion? James Michener, perhaps America’s best-known writer of the South Pacific, once termed himself a “nesomaniac” — or, a person mad about islands. That describes me as well, and the 70+ islands I’ve so far visited around the world demonstrates this madness … or as I prefer to say: It’s a good start!

To me, all islands are unique, they do not all look alike. “They might be as monotonous as the sea itself, but they are also as fresh as the sea with its varying interest” is a wonderful quote from writer James Norman Hall of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame. Islands are icons and offer visions of tranquility or the essence of ruggedness and self-reliance. We bring ourselves to our “island” of choice.

Many writers headed to the south seas in the last half of the 19th century, among them Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Jack London, and W. Somerset Maugham. Then, in the aftermath of World War I, the South Pacific attracted a host of writing talent in search of a simpler world. Americans Frederick O’Brien, James Norman Hall, Charles Nordhoff, and Robert Dean Frisbie, in particular, wrote numerous short stories and serials about Polynesia that provided a literary foundation for the well-known South Pacific stories later written by James Michener.

After too many years of living to work, I came across another James Norman Hall quote that I’ve come to identify with closely. He wrote it in the early 1920s after spending several months on a schooner wandering the lonely Tuamotu islands of French Polynesia, when he came across another ship anchored in a small atoll whose captain gave him a pile of recent newspapers from Tahiti. Hall read the papers that evening, then wrote in his notebook:

“. . . I heard as in a dream the far-off clamor of the outside world . . . but there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands, gorging food without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived. . . .”

The words struck me as timeless: more applicable today than when Hall wrote them nearly a century ago. I’d experienced enough ‘trivial burdens’ and ‘useless errands’ in the workplace already and his single paragraph described a way of life that was far too familiar. Hall’s abhorrent dream was too easily becoming my reality.

So my priorities shifted. I decided to work to live instead of living – dying? – to work, and thus I developed a clearer focus on what was important to me. The Tahitians have a phrase they use when things go wrong — “aita peapea” — which translates into “what does it matter” or “it’s no big deal,” and I’ve come to appreciate how useful that phrase is when deciding what is truly important in my daily life.

And now? I follow the advice of an anonymous writer, who scribed:

“The wise don’t expect to find life worth living; they make it that way.”