10 days ago I accompanied Aimee and Kellen to a weekly drum circle that occurs on the beach in the town that I live in.  Kellen had been the previous few weeks, and I had been busy on Thursday’s since returning from my summer travels, so I was excited to finally get to experience it.  I won’t spend many words describing the drum circle, as it was a drum circle, and I feel like that is self-explanatory.  The drumming was great. The company was great. The weather was great. A great time was had.

While there, I met a chef who had just finished her second day of work at the nicest restaurant in my town.  It should be said that my town is small but saturated with people, and considering it’s size, it has many food establishments. Over 100 food establishments for a town of 30,000 in 6.5 square miles. That’s quite a bit, especially compared to the last small town I lived in which had around 15 food establishments for a town of 10,000 people. She had had a good second day, all things considered, no complaints.  She had been on the island for just over a month. She had been camping on the beaches of Oahu for most of the time she’d been here. She was a chef at the nicest restaurant in one of the nicest towns on the island and she was homeless.

Needless to say she’s been staying in my ample-sized house since that night, on some nights accompanied by her friend/travel-companion/co-chef as well.  Why did 1 minimalist man with 1 dog buy a 4 bedroom/2 bathroom house last September? Because if you have room, you will find things to fill it. If you have an aversion to ’stuff’ then you are left to fill it with little else but people.  A year ago I lived alone, 1 of 1 (and Maxine), in an attempt to distance myself from everyone and much of what I knew. Today I find myself 1 of 5 (and Maxine), full of great food and exhausted from good times and the energy of great people. I’ve got so much to give.

There is no after-life where I will be rewarded by good deeds in the here-and-now. There is no tax benefit to allowing dream-chasing transients to live with you under your roof. There is no call from a long-dead prophet that I feel the need to answer (or even consider). There is however the guilt of knowing that you didn’t do something when you could. There is that nagging voice that whispers to you in the middle of your sleepless nights that the terrible world in which you live could be so much less terrible if everyone put their words into action. There is the truth that you get what you put out. Be generous in ways you can, put out your heart, and you just might get one back.  If not, coconut curry risotto with sauteed tofu/eggplant/sweet potatoes/asparagus is a close second.

One Of Many Karma Meals

I put in an offer to co-purchase a house.  Tomorrow the sellers either accept, counter, or reject the offer.  It’s a nice house that meets my needs perfectly, in an area of the island I want to live for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it all goes well, but if not, there are many more houses that fit my needs (the benefit of having few needs).

I’ve thought a lot about being 25 recently.  Like when I was seriously deciding to look into buying property, when I was filling out a mortgage application, when I was signing the offer contract, when I was contemplating being in debt for thirty years, when I was thinking about how much my life has changed in just the last five years and how much potential for change there is in the next five, when I was reflecting on how little job security I have as an un-contracted freelancer that is dependent on a single person providing me with enough work to sustain my lifestyle (that is not guaranteed), when I spent three hours in Starbucks on Saturday night reading through a hundred pages of documents that I had already signed and agreed to, and when I was sitting on the beach over the last few weeks looking at all the people a lot older then I.

I’ve thought a lot about being 25 recently.  Like how I haven’t had even a hint of a relationship in two years, or how I live in a place where I am isolated from everyone but my parents and grandfather, about how I will very soon have no friends within a 5-hour plane ride, about why that doesn’t bother me, about how all my posts start off light and end heavy and how that could be seen as a metaphor for my life so far.

I’ve thought a lot about how it doesn’t matter how old you are.  A boy dies at 4, a woman lives till 120.  A 13 year-old girl builds a multimillion dollar empire, an 80 year-old man loses everything he owns in a tornado. If you have support, and the ability to make things happen for yourself, I think little else matters.  If you don’t have the support, maybe it’s time to start building it by giving to and trusting others.  If you can’t make things happen for yourself, maybe it’s time to stop depending on your support so much and learn to hold your own. If you are afraid to lose what you have, maybe you should think about giving it up.  Maybe it’s just easy for me to say because I have both already.

I’m 25 and I’m co-buying a house in Hawaii.  A year ago I didn’t know what that meant.  I might still not actually know what that means.  It doesn’t matter, because I’ll figure it out, it’s what I do.  In no time, I have climbed to the top of my list, and I wans’t even racing. I figured out a way to get a job I love, I figured out a way to live in paradise, and I figured out a way to own a piece of paradise.  One day I’ll figure out what to figure out next.  Until then I’m free falling.