A long time ago, when I was young and living in another place, I had a very old neighbor from Russia. He interested me, because at 86, he had begun building a new house, when his old one burned down. And at 88, I watched him planting fruit trees. To labor for many days in the hot sun, at 88, to plant trees whose fruit he would never see, made him a curiosity to me.

At that time, I had not yet heard about the English builder who had built a great hall in 1386, and who had also planted the oak trees from which would come the lumber to replace the old timber 500 years later. Had he not planted the oaks, there would not have been replacement timber of the proper size five centuries later.

It was this old neighbor of mine, who told me, when I mentioned that I was moving to Hawaii, that I shouldn’t stay there for more than 3 years, because the European brain began to deteriorate after three years in the tropics.

My old neighbor had been in prisons and gulags, and knew about deterioration.

Now that I’ve been here almost 25 years, I can say from experience, that he was right about the deterioration, but wrong about the number of years it took.

People blame drugs, music, the sun and other things for the low mentality here, but ease of living, luxuriance, indulgence, comfort and a false sense of security make one indolent, soft, weak, inert, static, self-absorbed and narrowly dimensional.

We may live long here, but we are not a dynamic, rapidly evolving and interesting people.

- Raphael O’Suna, Haiku