Both Feet in the Sand: A Commencement Speech for the Ones Who Stayed

It’s June! Just as in high school or college at this time of the year, graduation ceremonies are going on and the commencement speech shares insights and truths found along the way and a call to action. So, if you have been made it living on the island full time beyond three years, I wrote this for you and for the ones who are considering it.

 

 

There’s no ceremony for this. No cap and gown, no diploma handed to you across a stage, no proud parent dabbing their eyes in the third row. But if you have lived in Hawaii for three years — really lived here, not just waited here — you have earned something that doesn’t fit in a frame.

You graduated.

And I want to tell you what that means, because nobody told me.

Let’s start with the ones still on the fence. The ones lying awake somewhere on the mainland right now, scrolling real estate listings at midnight and watching our 365Hawaii videos thinking could I actually do this?

Here’s what I want you to know: the people who make it here didn’t arrive fearless. They didn’t have a perfect plan or a guarantee that it would all work out. What they had — what you’re going to need — is something quieter than courage and harder to fake.

They had kindness in them already.

Because here’s the thing about Aloha that nobody puts on a brochure. It’s not a greeting. It’s not a vibe. It’s not something the island hands you when you emerge from the Kona airport. Aloha is a recognition — it sees the kindness you already carry and it meets it. If you arrive here open-hearted, curious, willing to receive as much as you give, the island will wrap itself around you in ways you won’t be able to explain to your friends back home without sounding a little unhinged.

But if you arrive here guarded, transactional, taking more than you give — you’ll find this place beautiful and baffling and ultimately not quite right, and you’ll leave wondering what everyone else was talking about.

So yes. You had to bring it with you.

Now. To those of you in year one or two — bless your hearts, you are in it.

You’re learning that everything costs more and takes longer and the contractor might show up Tuesday or might show up on a Tuesday, just not necessarily this Tuesday. You’ve cried on the phone to your friends or family. You’ve had a moment — maybe more than one — where you stood in a parking lot in the heat and thought what have I done? (Yes, I have been there!)

You’ve also watched a sunset that made your heart sing and your decision to move here seem like the best idea you ever had.

Here’s what I wish someone had sat me down and said straight: life is hard wherever you are.

That’s not a warning. That’s the most liberating thing I can tell you.

The hard things were always going to find you. The loss of your old life, the worry if you’re going to make it, the days when nothing works and everything costs money you don’t have — that’s not the island’s fault. That’s the human condition, and it was waiting for you in Phoenix and Portland and wherever you came from, too. You didn’t escape hard by moving here. But here’s what you did do:

You chose to go through it next to the ocean in Hawaii.

You chose to go through it in a place where a stranger will stop and help you, where someone at the farmers market hands you a sample and calls you Aunty, where the air smells like plumeria and salt and something you still don’t have a word for. You chose to go through the universal human struggle in a place that is, against all odds, genuinely magic.

That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

And then there’s year three.

Something shifts. It’s quiet, the shift — don’t expect a parade. But one day you realize you stopped doing the comparison. You stopped measuring your life here against your life there. You stopped the internal monologue that sounded like well back in Denver we had or at least in California you could.

You just... stopped.

And in that silence, something clicked into place. The island stopped being the place you moved to and became the place you just live. Your body knows the rhythm of the seasons now. You have a favorite beach that you’d rather not tell people about. You understand that slow is not lazy — it’s intentional. You’ve learned that the noise that used to fill your head — the comparison, the keeping up, the measuring of your life against everyone else’s highlight reel — that noise doesn’t find you here the way it used to.

This place has a way of quieting all that.

And in that quiet, a lot of people find themselves. Not a new self — the self that was always there, waiting for enough space to breathe.

So here is your graduation gift, from someone who has lived this life for nearly twenty years and still has moments where she pulls over on Ali’i Drive just to look at the ocean and think how is this my life?

You feel like you belong here now.

Not because the island owes you belonging. Not because you bought property or got a local’s discount at the plate lunch place or learned to pronounce Hualalai correctly on the first try. You belong here because you did the work of belonging — you stayed when it was hard, you found friends, you gave something back to the island, you let this place change you instead of trying to change it.

Some of you will face a day when life calls you back — a parent who needs you, a health situation, something that pulls harder than even this. And if that day comes, you’ll go. But you’ll go like someone leaving home, not escaping it. And a piece of this island will travel in your soul forever, salt-worn and deep and absolutely yours.

But for those of you with both feet planted in this volcanic soil?

Go live your life here.

The ocean is right there. The people are good. The challenges are coming — they always are — but so is the sunset, and the rain that clears the Vog, and the neighbor who shows up with mangoes for no reason at all.

You made it past the hard part.

Now comes the best part, keep sharing the Aloha. The island needs more all of the time. Heck, the whole world needs more. Give, it always comes back. Mahalo for staying.