Today I was out on the boat with my good friend Voni. We decided to go to the sandbar since the weather was nice and we wanted to do some relaxing and snorkeling. I tend not to go to the parts of the Sandbar where all the other boats go, since silence is solitudes favorite mistress after all. There was only one other boat within ear shot, the same one that I’d seen at the same spot last week. A powered catamaran with an eclectic group of tourists on board.

As we dropped anchor, they were preparing to leave. Unlike the last time I’d seen the boat leave, the captain decided today to break out his guitar and sing a song or two for his passengers on deck.  He put on a descent act and between the two songs made note to his passengers that there were four couples on board celebrating their honeymoon. Two couples had made the voyage from as far as Japan, and the other two I assume were mainland Americans.

On an otherwise unremarkable (at least to me in my current life) Thursday, I had casually decided to spend the sunny hours of the day doing what I do often, hanging out on the boat with a friend at the sandbar. Today, on that single catamaran alone, eight people had chosen this activity as one of the few things they would do on what most couples assume will be the best week of their lives. Their best week of their lives were spent doing what I do on an average Thursday? Can this be real?

I obviously spent some time thinking over this conundrum of epic proportions and decided to vocalize it to Voni. She had heard the captains speech about the honeymooners, but hadn’t thought about the situation quite like I had. We didn’t talk much about it at the time, but I’m sure in the days to come we will. I did happen to mention that I felt I had done nothing to deserve this, and she made some remark about how I was ‘blessed’ (a term I love to despise). My only retort was something to the effect that we should all revel in the random chaos that led me, in this universe, to be there at the sandbar with her at that moment, for us a Thursday and for others less than one hundred feet away their honeymoon.

Life isn’t fair. I get that. I’m fortunate/lucky/blessed/victim-of-chance/whatever-you-fate-loving-star-reading-cosmic-circumstance-tea-leaf-reading lunatics want to call it. I get that too. I can’t appreciate my situation in this life because I can’t remember all my previous lives where I endlessly dedicated myself to bettering the world, karmic amnesia. Sure, I can even get that too. I’ll accept it all (or none of it, but this isn’t where my current dilemma lies). It’s where do I go from here?

I don’t mean geographically. The sandbar is great, it’s beautiful. I’m in Hawaii after all (but it’s Oahu, it’s not Kauai or Maui), so forgetting the beauty that immediately surrounds you at all times would be a trying task for anyone but the blind. I know there are more beautiful places on this earth, I’ve been there. If I wanted to live there, I would. I don’t mean that any honeymoons I may have will have to be ‘better’ or ‘more’ than a visit to the beloved sandbar of Kaneohe bay.  Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but a week on the couch with the one you love can be just as rewarding (“Tell me that after you’ve been married for X number of years” you say. HAR HAR, “I’m sorry you decided to spend forever with someone who you didn’t feel that way about, everyone makes mistakes, I’m sorry you made that mistake. Yes I know a divorce attorney” I say. I digress).

What I mean is, if I decided to have goals/dreams (and for those of you who don’t know, I don’t), what could I possibly expect them to be? I live in paradise. I have a roof over my head. I have the only job I’ve ever wanted. I have every material possession I want (and I want less of what I have). I used to think I didn’t want to have goals/dreams because they limited people and a side-effect was a disconnection with life as it was passing (keep your eyes on the prize, and you forget your supposed to be enjoying the experience). Nowadays I’m more inclined to think that if I actually fabricated goals/dreams for myself they’d border on absurdity.

I know I’ve burned through twice my allotted quota of proverbial metaphors, but if you’ll permit me this final attempt I’ll be able to end this post confident that at least one of them will make sense. I’m not sure the last time I’ve had this much trouble articulating my thoughts on paper or out loud, unfortunately this isn’t a rarity lately (maybe I’m getting old). We are in uncharted waters, with no nautical navigation charts, no GPS or depth-finders here. We march to the beat of a different drum, and we don’t know what to do when our drummer quits? Different drum drummers are hard to come by. They don’t frequent craigslist or myspace (remember, they drum the beats on a different drum). If we are so lucky that we find a stand-in, what happens if we don’t like their beat? What happens if we can’t figure out how to march to it? Or worse, what happens if we figure it out just fine, but we aren’t sure about where we are marching to?

Tags: 1901, America, Boats, Craigslist, Drummers, Honeymoon, Japan, Kaneohe, MySpace, Phoenix, Sandbar

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