Happy Talk and Talk Story

If you saw South Pacific, the movie or musical you know the term "Happy Talk" which is the talk of happy friends or lovers. Also, if you have spent much time in Hawaii talking with locals like I have you also might have heard the term "Talk Story" which means to speak about the story of your people, nation, tribe's history and spiritual and cultural history or it also could mean telling the stories of your lifetime. Talk story means to share important things with others which tends to bless you both or all.

This morning waking up my wife was telling me of coming to Hawaii with her mother from mainland California around 1960 when she was 5. Her mother loved the term "Happy Talk" and incorporated it into her life because her mother was just so enamored with Hawaii and all things Hawaiian. I must admit I have had similar experiences in my life. Two of the cultures that have touched me very deeply as a person are the Native Hawaiian culture and the Tibetan Culture.

Both understand the importance of being in touch with one's intuitive nature. And since I have always been very instinctual and intuitively centered in how I experience life I also appreciate cultures who lead with their intuitive gifts as well.

Sometimes growing up I felt very shortchanged by just how intellectual American culture can be, especially for someone like myself who tends to sense things even before they happen. So, when as a young man I became a Southern California Surfer starting at about age 12 to 14, I found myself around other boys who tended to sense the ocean and nature in a deeper way than many intellectuals do, or materialists do that one is constantly surrounded by in American culture. So, even though I gave up surfing by age 21 and instead turned to mountain climbing and skiing and many other sports including off road motorcycles and rock climbing and flying planes and gliders and hang gliding, I still loved the freedom of surfing and still continued to boogey board and body surf and snorkel and SCUBA DIVE. So my relationship with the ocean remained pure and untouched. So when I first moved to Hilo on the big Island of Hawaii, with my first wife and baby, the dream of the ideal Hawaiian experience was still within me of the perfect wave and the perfect idealized life.

Though it is true that Hawaii is like moving to paradise and that one can get lost in this paradise just like anywhere else, one can also find themselves in ways sometimes not possible on the mainland.

My experience of finding myself came at age 26 in Hilo, Hawaii. I was thinking one day how people who live on earth where it snows have to sort of be sort of neurotic to survive the snow places in that they have to be busy all the time to survive the winters. I thought back of how humans had survived in different locations around the world and realized that people who survived in places like Hawaii or Tahiti or other Pacific Islands had completely different problems than snow living people. And I realized that our "snow Culture" of Europe and the U.S. were sort of neurotic compared to the life the native Hawaiians had lived. Sure, other cultures have their own endemic problems but they are completely different than the culture I grew up in in California and the U.S.

So, as I realized that the natural state of a human not living in snow country might be to pick coconuts off of trees and to make a boat or outrigger and go fishing and swim and maybe make the first surfboard. I thought to myself about just "How Neurotic" do you have to be to go from a warm place to where it snows and want to just have to work your butt off until you die just to barely survive?

What I realized is that most people live like this because they haven't seen another way to be. It isn't that one lifestyle is inherently better than any other. For me, the point is it is good to be able to make a choice of what your life will be and where you will live it. For most people on earth, they either never get to ask this question because they will live exactly where they were born and work at whatever their father or mother did. But for me, I have a choice because I was born into the very mobile California culture. I can choose to be whoever I want to be and go anywhere I want to in the world and live where I want to because I can. So, I CAN have the luxury of "Happy Talk" and "Talk Story" because I choose to.

However, I am now grown up enough to realize that we are all very different people around the world and what would be good for one person wouldn't necessarily work for another. So, in the end though Happy Talk and Talk Story are good for me, the most important thing I realize for everyone is to "know yourself". For only in this way can you ever be happy and have a good life.