Aloha Party Peoples. I'm truthfully a lost soul but blessed none the less, most of us are. One of the biggest blessings I have beyond my radical family, is my radical friends. I owe it to all of them for showing me the way. I have taken what they have shared with me and become a leader on my good days. A leader of Good times. And a follower of my homies when I need them to lead.
Thank God.
My wife too. She'll lead the way when it comes time to create a routine to brush my boy's teeth every night. And I'll take the lead when it comes time to surf, skate or create....
Then sometimes we turn up the music and have a dance party all together.
That's how I met my wife. Her dancing caught my eye.
The other day I was skating home from the skatepark after work and saw some cassette tapes in the trash. I picked up the one that said "Success with Positive Mental Attitude." It talked about how in order to succeed in anything, you need to have self-discipline blah blah... Actually there was some very cool words in that roll of audio tape. But more interesting are the thoughts that arose the early morning after.
It was 4:30 am and I woke up thinking about how the cool thing about skateboarding, surfing, art, climbing, snowboarding, learning, is that passion can drive self-discipline, so you don't even feel like your disciplining yourself.
When kids ask me, how do you ollie (one of the most basic tricks in skateboarding)? If you really want to learn it, try it a hundred times and then talk to me. If you don't get it then, then try it another hundred times. Heck thats what I did. If your like me and not my brother Bob who learns physical feats in day, your like most people who try and try again. Once you learn, then you'll learn what it means to be "STOKED"
The cool thing about young passion is that if you are lucky to have a passion for something at a young age and no one to stop you from delving into your passion, you will likely get good it. When you're young, without adult obligations, you have all the time in the world.
If there was one thing I benefitted from when my mother and father divorced, was that during my teen years they were involved raising their newborn children from their new marriages. They let me do as I please and unknowingly developed a practice routine for skateboarding which went as follows, "Dkate every day after school before doing homework. Most kids would probably have those two priorities switched around. Not I. Thank God I had a deep desire to skateboard.. Thank God they instilled in me some good values.
Thank God. Now that I come to think about it, I was a pretty mean kid. Just ask my friends from my neighborhood on Amundsen Lane. Some how I'd like to think that I turned out to be a respectable and kind human being.
Yeah so the cool thing about passion and self discipline, is that passion can replace self-discipline, or make self discipline a breeze. That was my interesting discovery after listening to that tape I found in the trash.
Unfortunately when I lived in Brooklyn I was passionate about NYC Night Life. I was really good at it. But thankfully I realized that the rock star life style is a dead end street. Thankfully my passion for surfing was greater than my passion to party hard.
I'd rather continue seeing the world.. So here I am on the island of Oahu writing to you and sharing whatever I can scrape from this soul.
Posted below is the final IN4MATION ad that went to print in Flux Magazine Fall 2013 Issue, a Hawaii Arts and Culture Magazine. Stoked on it.
Time to catch some Zs.
-Manny Aloha
