The World is Waiting For You
This one's a bigger hit for me than Champagne Pond. This was just south of Kapoho Bay, on the other side of the point where this vacation home sat, on a centuries-old lava shelf at the edge of the Pacific that formed a maze of shallow, interconnected tide pools. (I posted a similar picture of this spot in 2009.) The Vacationland subdivision was right here behind me, but they weren't as persnickety about tourists as the Champagne Pond people. You could drive right up to the tide pools, and they had a metal can where they asked for donations from people who parked. We came here with rented snorkel equipment three or four times.
There are certain periods of my life I don't like to talk about. I'm going to mention one of them now, because it's a big part of why we went to Hawaii in 2009 and why the places I saw on this trip are so special to me.
In late 2008, a doctor found a fist-sized tumor on the right side of my chest. The medical folks diagnosed it as Hodgkins Lymphoma, and I spent the rest of 2008 and much of 2009 going through all the stuff you go through when you get cancer, all the chemotherapy and radiation and poking and prodding and all that, along with all the side effects that go along with it. I try to be stoic about this sort of thing, but I'm not afraid to tell you now that all that sucked. I just want to be left alone when I'm sick, but when it's cancer, nobody will leave you alone, and there are always people poking around all over you in ways you don't want to be poked over, and the chemicals do things to your body I still find a little nauseating to think about.
And then there are mental and emotional things that go along with all that, things I don't talk about at all. It wasn't necessarily just fear-of-death stuff, though that was part of it. But I feel like on top of that, I was just sort of fuzzy-brained for a while. Maybe it was an effect of the chemicals reworking my internal wiring somehow, but I feel like my ability to perceive the real world changed for a while in certain ways I didn't realize for a long time. I feel like I got a little foggy, and that I had to push through that without even realizing I was doing it. Some of it gets very hazy.
But at the end of the summer of 2009, I came out of all those medical horrors and got to go to Hawaii, and that was the state of my brain when I took this picture and swam in the Kapoho Tide Pools.
This might seem cliche, but then again, what doesn't? Going through something like that really emphasizes the fragility of life. It drives home the need to embrace the moment where you are, because that moment won't last forever. Soon, the moment passes, and you move onto another moment with nothing more from the experience but those few chemical traces in the brain that translate to memory. My memories of Hawaii are of a quiet place nearly perfect in its tranquility, a simple place of soft trade winds and soothing seas where you could let yourself float on the currents of the pools and watch all the fish and coral pass beneath you. I felt like I could touch the rhythm of the planet for a while here, and I relished the chance to do that, because I knew how close I'd come to having that denied to me forever.
And so, in a way, it's almost appropriate now that this is all gone. It just reinforces the tenuous nature of the universe. Nothing in this world lasts forever, not you or me or even the world itself. Someday every bit of it will be a cinder.
So don't put anything off. Embrace it all now. The world is waiting for you. But it won't wait forever.
The World is Waiting For You
This one's a bigger hit for me than Champagne Pond. This was just south of Kapoho Bay, on the other side of the point where this vacation home sat, on a centuries-old lava shelf at the edge of the Pacific that formed a maze of shallow, interconnected tide pools. (I posted a similar picture of this spot in 2009.) The Vacationland subdivision was right here behind me, but they weren't as persnickety about tourists as the Champagne Pond people. You could drive right up to the tide pools, and they had a metal can where they asked for donations from people who parked. We came here with rented snorkel equipment three or four times.
There are certain periods of my life I don't like to talk about. I'm going to mention one of them now, because it's a big part of why we went to Hawaii in 2009 and why the places I saw on this trip are so special to me.
In late 2008, a doctor found a fist-sized tumor on the right side of my chest. The medical folks diagnosed it as Hodgkins Lymphoma, and I spent the rest of 2008 and much of 2009 going through all the stuff you go through when you get cancer, all the chemotherapy and radiation and poking and prodding and all that, along with all the side effects that go along with it. I try to be stoic about this sort of thing, but I'm not afraid to tell you now that all that sucked. I just want to be left alone when I'm sick, but when it's cancer, nobody will leave you alone, and there are always people poking around all over you in ways you don't want to be poked over, and the chemicals do things to your body I still find a little nauseating to think about.
And then there are mental and emotional things that go along with all that, things I don't talk about at all. It wasn't necessarily just fear-of-death stuff, though that was part of it. But I feel like on top of that, I was just sort of fuzzy-brained for a while. Maybe it was an effect of the chemicals reworking my internal wiring somehow, but I feel like my ability to perceive the real world changed for a while in certain ways I didn't realize for a long time. I feel like I got a little foggy, and that I had to push through that without even realizing I was doing it. Some of it gets very hazy.
But at the end of the summer of 2009, I came out of all those medical horrors and got to go to Hawaii, and that was the state of my brain when I took this picture and swam in the Kapoho Tide Pools.
This might seem cliche, but then again, what doesn't? Going through something like that really emphasizes the fragility of life. It drives home the need to embrace the moment where you are, because that moment won't last forever. Soon, the moment passes, and you move onto another moment with nothing more from the experience but those few chemical traces in the brain that translate to memory. My memories of Hawaii are of a quiet place nearly perfect in its tranquility, a simple place of soft trade winds and soothing seas where you could let yourself float on the currents of the pools and watch all the fish and coral pass beneath you. I felt like I could touch the rhythm of the planet for a while here, and I relished the chance to do that, because I knew how close I'd come to having that denied to me forever.
And so, in a way, it's almost appropriate now that this is all gone. It just reinforces the tenuous nature of the universe. Nothing in this world lasts forever, not you or me or even the world itself. Someday every bit of it will be a cinder.
So don't put anything off. Embrace it all now. The world is waiting for you. But it won't wait forever.