The art of island building

The name of the game is Independence. Sanctuary. Homebase tagged in the moment before one gets out. That is life - the dual, divisional processes of solitude and interaction. They are not, of course, mutually exclusive and they often overlap. But while our interpersonal relationships fluctuate with all the fickle force of a hurricane, our intrapersonal state can be as calm and deep as the ocean. And as strong as the hurricane might appear, it bases it's entire existence on it's proximity to the ocean.

Along these lines, it seems to me like we spend our whole lives learning the art of island building. Our virtues are it's beauties, it's palm trees and glowing beaches, while our vices are its volcanoes, often dormant but capable of eradicating all our careful efforts in one single bout of baleful expression. We educate ourselves and the island grows, we meet with disappointment and our island shrinks beneath the weight of dark storm clouds. Our successes gather in golden clusters along it's shoreline, beaming brightly to the world, while our failures sprinkle themselves like dark snow, dulling every surface. What we take pride in we hold out to the very edges of the coast, as eager children during show and tell, while what shames us we hold close, secreted within dark forests so that the world may never see.

You, me, everybody has their island. The entirety of our social reality is one vast body of water endlessly dotted with these constantly revised citadels of ourselves. The crazy thing is how little we seem to know about our own islands, how little we appreciate what causes what. We are oftentimes experts on our neighbors islands - what hammocks they employ, how many coconut trees they have and how white their beaches are. But we couldn't tell you what we want to do with our own island, what we want to add and what we want to disappear. Or rather, we know the facts but not the application. Well, there is a quote my anthropology professor shared with our class: "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."

With this lens reality becomes a simple question that proves complex in answering: Where are you going with your island?