Morning Bliss in Hawaii
I’m sitting here sipping a vanilla macadamia nut coffee, listening to birds cooing just outside the window. The temperature is perfect—both the coffee and the air around me. In the early morning, the scents of the ocean and the jungle drift in, pure and uncorrupted. It’s truly amazing to be back in Hawaii.
The past few weeks have carried a lot of emotions. Before we left, a string of small issues made the mental preparation harder than it might have otherwise been. There were minor health concerns, like our youngest daughter getting sick right after Christmas, that ramped up the anxiety about leaving the country. When you’re trying to control every variable for a trip like this, even tiny things feel enormous. The older kids were focused on squeezing in time with friends, which is completely understandable but tricky when we were racing to get everything sorted. And my eldest son’s sleep schedule, waking up at the crack of noon or later, wasn’t exactly helping us check items off the list. Then came the usual logistics: currency exchange, confirming airplane seats, reaching out to contacts in different places, and all the rest.
Everything that needed to get done did get done. All the worries have either been handled or revealed themselves to be unimportant.
We can let go of 2025’s challenges.
It’s 2026. Here we are.
We are already adjusting to life her in Hawaii.
We used our time well enough over the past weeks, months, and years, and now we’re starting to reap the rewards.
The finite nature of time has been a real driving force behind this whole adventure. You only live once. You only have so many years on this planet, and you never know exactly how many. Life can change in an instant. Cancer diagnoses happen to people in their 40s. Careers that take decades to build can go up in smoke in a day. Family members can be struck with illness or other myriad tragedies all of a sudden. When something like that happens, the world reorients itself and perspectives shift.
Life gets divided into the “before” time and the “after” time of some major life events.
That awareness is what pushed us to stop waiting and just go.
So here we are, breathing deeply, soaking it in. These quiet Hawaii mornings, the perfect coffee, the birds, the ocean air—it all feels like the reward we hoped for. Carpe diem.
Aloha from paradise.
The Patriarch
