Pretty/Beautiful

It's pretty here. Probably better than that, it's gorgeous here. Pretty is such a small word. Twenty-two year olds are pretty. In fact I saw two of them just yesterday, sitting by the pool practicing being pretty. The young man post-pubescent boy wonder kept strategically adjusting himself so that his eight pack abs would flash golden in the sunlight. His counterpart (who was deperately in need of a Muslim conversion and a burqa) was wearing a two piece bathing suit which vaguely resembled an elastic belt with buttocks hanging out. I think she may have had some back problems because she kept snapping her shoulders back and thrusting her chest at the boy.

Wendy and I debated how old they were and decided that no matter how old they were, they proved without a doubt how old we were. I asked Wendy at what age a person realizes they are pretty. She pointed at them and said, "That age."

Today, I'm sitting on the promenade of the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the big island of Hawai'i on the last day of Wendy and I's little kid-free getaway. Wendy left last night because she is a better parent than me (let's be honest folks... it's true). All the while, I am giving myself one more fleeting day to catch my breath, have a clear thought and successfully wind myself back up again for the muscular sprint to the end of the year.

It takes an enormous amount of focus for me during this era of my life to think clearly, to concentrate. It took me a good three days here in Hawai'i, for me to calm down long enough to not constantly be wondering about what else I should be doing, what projects were on the verge of thermonuclear self-destruct, who in my little world was next to be dangerously wobbling near the brink. In short, it took me nearly three days to stop managing.

For all practical purposes, managing is what I do for a living. Sure I manage under the auspices of financial planning, but more tha anything I get paid, to keep a system running, to keep the boat at sea, to maintain a steady course. And the sad thing is, it doesn't take much in the way of ideas to manage things. In fact, most days I find that a good idea makes managing more difficult. An idea causes you to question the system, upend the status quo, push the boundaries, acknowledge the quaking fissures steaming below.

I am sitting on an island that exists in all it's splendor because of quaking fissures. volcanic cracks that exploded in dangerous upheavals creating a once-treacherous landscape resembling something like the dark side of the moon. But out of the heat and tumult came this:






Perhaps this is why, every so often a person must stop managing, stop organizing and think. Why a person must sniff around the dark and dank places of one's life or business and consider the impending chaos that brews below. Thinking is not pretty. You can't wrap up concentration in bikini and put it on the cover of Seventeen magazine. But from recognizing the challenging deep around, from the discovery of threatening lava tubes and cracks, can come something beautiful: an idea.

An idea that threatens the safety of situation normal, and with it carries the possibility of an extraordinary day, week, month, year, moment. The solitude and silence required to think, to truly consider, is not pretty. But ideas are beautiful.

"Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way.
I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the
appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere."

- A. A. Milne