Monday, January 27, 2014

Family and Maui



Sometimes we get along with our families and sometimes we do not. The times when we do not, we ask ourselves why I am in this family; or why my sister or brother behaves that way?; or why my aunt cannot forgive? And so on. We wish they would understand us better and that they would do things the same way we would. 

I am going to refer now to Maui which is the place I am right now. Maui is not only beautiful and famous for its views. Maui has a lot of attractions for all type of people. The same way a lot of people who lives here, are here for different reasons. I find interesting the fact that almost 80% of the people (from my inner census), who leaves here, came from other places. From this 80%, even the ones born here their parents or grandparents came from other places in the US or other parts of the world. What we have in common is that almost all of us find Maui as our home, even though we are all immigrants here. Actually the fact that we are all from elsewhere, make us more open to accept each other (of course there are exceptions as always, I am trying to give a big picture here). 

This just came to my mind the other day when I was talking to a friend about our families. We are a little bit far from mainland, 5 hours from California and 7 hours from Japan on an airplane, and a lot of the people here if not most of us, we have our relatives somewhere else in mainland. This make some of us miss our families very much and others, I have heard them saying: "good that I am far away from my family drama"… What I truly believe is that our family are those people we find everywhere we go and who take care of us, family is not only a blood related person who we call brother or sister; family are those brothers and sisters we find along our journey on this planet. When we find the beauty of sharing being away from our blood relatives, we find on each other a family member and we do not feel alone anymore. We feel at home.