Manoa Falls and Holding Space for our Future

Sometimes we let our boys run around with pajama pants and no shirts. And jump in mud puddles, even though that means they’re muddy for the rest of the day. I think in order to raise future adults you want to like, you have to start letting them live the life and be the people now that you want them to live and be later. Which means if we want to raise adventurous, confident, outdoors boys, we have to let them do things like walk along the edges of trails, put them in front of a rock pile that is half their size and be there to help them when they slip. And if we want to hike with them later we have to hike with them now.

In fact, it’s similar to coming into a new year. We come into a new year and look at our lives and realize, or realize again, things that we want to change in our lives. But if we decide who we want to be in a year’s time (or two years, or five) and try to do all of that immediately, we aren’t capable of it, any more than my three year old is capable of a fifty foot shark dive. Instead, what we can do is prepare ourselves for when we can do those things. In other words, we hike a little bit now. We write a little bit now. We run a little bit now. And when that becomes easy, and when we have little more time, we go on the next thing.

It’s easy to draw a line between ‘now and later’ and think that we will just do the things we want to do later if we don’t have those capabilities now. And there is some truth to that. We can’t do 14 miles through the Hawaiian jungle with toddlers, after all.

But sometimes if all we’ve done is wait, what happens is that when later comes we have forgotten what we meant to do all along. And we’ve spent so much time carrying the kids and telling them to be careful and not to climb is that later they don’t know how to do the things we wanted them to do. In that sense, just waiting for later doesn’t leave the space open for later. And we find, when we get to the later days, that the space that was once open for doing these things is now closed. Something always fill up empty spaces, after all.

But more than that, more than leaving a space in our future for the things we want to do, it means that we forget to do what we can actually do now. We forget we can still do small hikes, or write a little, or learn a new skill that will factor into our future plans. We forget, that in a small way, we can still prepare.

So, these days, we do a few things in a small way. We can’t scale a mountain yet, but we can go up old, moss covered jungle stairs. We can’t swim in the waterfalls, but we can throw rocks into them. And Lincoln can’t do the Haiku Stairs, but he can hike 1.8 miles through slippery rocks, with Mina following not far behind.

Manoa Falls is one of the most popular hikes on Oahu, and it always comes up in the ‘What Hikes to do with Kids’ articles, so in the interest of holding space for adventures, we thought we’d give it a try, and we took the dog along because her whole month has been spent cowering under the bed because of the boisterous Kaneohe fireworks.

But for a trail that is always boasted that it’s best for kids, I expected it to be a little more paved and a little less foot deep mud and clambering over wet rocks. What do I know, I guess. It just goes to show you that really there isn’t that much in Hawaii that IS perfect for small children.

In fact, one lady actually stopped horrified and judgmental at the sight of Lincoln climbing over rock walls, “It gets dangerous up there, you know!!” We kept waiting for the dangerous part, and it never quite hit. In fact, when we got to the waterfall, Lincoln almost started crying because he had been carrying some very specific rocks to throw in the waterfall, but it was roped off, so we showed him the way through so he could get that important task done. We all have our things to do, after all.

We stopped for snacks by the bamboo forest (“Take, Mom!!”-pronounced ta-kay, the Japanese word for bamboo.) Not quite up to Arashiyama standards, but still full of straight green beauty, and some had fallen down so Lincoln could have some long sticks that he was very excited about.

There were parrots high in trees across from jungle rainbows, and large mud puddles that gave Eliot more joy than anything else on the trip. And of course, the waterfall.

We can’t do everything that Hawaii has to offer because of our small kids, and I can’t focus on my writing as much as I would like to because of those same small children.

But we can wonder at a waterfall, at a rainbow on the way, and write a blog.

A little is always better than nothing, after all, and we use it to look to the future, to the people we want to be in ten years, to the men we want our boys to be in twenty years, and to the writing I want to do whenever I am not constantly needed to parcel out snacks and toy cars.

We hold the space open for who we want to be.