Rooting for Your Dreams

One evening during my recent trip to Honolulu, I was sitting in an upscale sushi bar on Kalakaua Avenue – the “strip” – on Waikiki Beach. To my right was an empty seat, and on the other side of that chair sat an obviously wealthy Japanese woman and several of her friends. Five or six empty chairs were available down the sushi bar on my left-hand side.

As I sat enjoying a lovely miso-glazed butterfish and a Dancing Geisha (crushed blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries with tonic water and vodka), I noticed the restaurant had copies of their “house” music CDs available for purchase. I picked one up and was surprised to find that Bob Marley was the house music in a Japanese restaurant in Hawaii. And sure enough, “No Woman, No Cry” was wailing over the speakers.

At that moment, a woman slipped into the seat between me and the Japanese lady. She was barely five feet tall, and she wore board shorts, flip flops, and a Billabong surf shirt. Her hair was wet, and her clothes were damp. As she sat down, she shivered and said, “I just came in off the beach. It’s my birthday, and I’m treating myself to some sushi tonight.”

“Happy Birthday!” I said. We introduced ourselves, and then Millie began to study the menu. When she began shivering again, the Japanese lady looked at her and then took off the Chanel jacket she was wearing and put it around Millie’s shoulders.

As Millie thanked her, the Japanese woman said, “We take care of people here. It’s the Waikiki Way.”

Millie looked at me and said, “I knew it was going to be like that here. I just moved here from Washington D.C. last month, and I’ve already met the most wonderful people.”

Intrigued, I asked her why she’d moved to Honolulu. “I wanted to,” she said simply.

It can’t be that easy, I thought. It just can’t. As if she had read my mind, Millie looked at me and said, “In life, you have to decide what you want. I wanted to live somewhere with nice weather and with a beach. So I moved here.”

I’d heard those words before. In a television interview, Elizabeth Gilbert, the woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a book that became an international bestseller, said this about her success: “Every morning, you wake up and ask yourself, ‘What do I really, really, really want?’” And once you’ve answered that question, she said, you move in that direction.

I told Millie I admired her bravery and wished her well. As I left the restaurant, I heard Bob Marley singing, “Don’t worry about a thing/cause every little thing’s gonna be alright.”

I was still thinking about Millie the next morning as I put on my workout clothes, grabbed my iPod, and headed out for a long walk. I marveled at the courage it must take to pull up roots and move such a huge distance.

And then I saw it, the massive Banyan tree growing in Kapiolani Park. Banyan tree branches develop rope-like “vines” that hang from them and grow downward. These “vines” are actually aerial roots that take hold in the ground and grow into thick, woody trunks. With age, these new trunks become indistinguishable from the main trunk, and that’s how the Banyan grows. In fact, one particular large old Banyan on the island of Maui covers almost 2/3 of an acre.

Interestingly, in Hindu mythology, the Banyan is call the “wish-fulfilling tree" because of it's ever-expanding state.

I wonder if moving – or even going for what you really want in life – is really the painful all-or-nothing process we like to make it, the gut-wrenching decision to give up something meaningful for something desired. If we could use the Banyan tree as a metaphor and see change as more of a process of putting down new roots, of growing stronger by expanding, then maybe we can have the courage to pursue our heart’s biggest desires with the assurance that, indeed, every little thing will be all right.