The Business Trip

*The Business Trip: Spirit and Scenery in Hawaiʻi

I recently had the opportunity to travel for work, this time for more than a single day; to two of the Hawaiian Islands: the Big Island (Hawaiʻi) and Maui. Each trip lasted five days. Before this, my experience of both islands had been limited to quick, utilitarian visits: airport to job site, job site back to the airport, then home to Oʻahu.

Because of that, I never felt I had the right to speak about them. In some ways, I still don’t. But having time, however limited to explore, observe, and interact changed something. What I felt during these trips only confirmed what I had sensed before.

The Big Island: The Spirit of the Unfinished On the Big Island, the spirit of aloha is tangible. It’s present in the people, in the way strangers acknowledge one another, and in the absence of performance.

Driving from Kona to Hilo, the island transforms beneath you in less than an hour and a half dry, sunlit slopes give way to misty highlands, then endless green rainforests. The road winds over lava rock, across land still forming. There’s a quiet duality here: destruction and creation side by side. New land emerges, vegetation takes root, wildlife roams, and you are standing on something unfinished.

At times, it feels like an entirely different country. There are moments that bring to mind a scene from The Lion King—when Mufasa shows Simba the horizon and says, “Those are the badlands. You must never go there.” Not as a threat, but as a quiet acknowledgment of boundaries, of places shaped by forces beyond control.

Sitting at the edge of Hilo Bay at Liliʻuokalani Gardens, I was reminded of places like Scotland or Ireland; lush, dramatic, and ancient. But the difference here is warmth. Not just in temperature, but in people. Regardless of race or background, there’s a shared ease, a generosity of presence, as if the land itself teaches restraint, respect, and belonging.

Maui: The Stifled Breath

Leaving the Big Island for Maui was jarringless like moving between islands, more like switching channels from a documentary to a commercial. The air, though just as warm, felt heavier with the weight of expectation. If the Big Island is a place where you are invited to simply be, Maui felt like a place where you are expected to consume.

Despite its undeniable beauty, it feels disconnected. Interactions with people often feel transactional rather than human, more like exchanges than encounters. There’s a subtle standoffishness, an entitled edge, that lingers beneath the surface.

This didn’t happen by accident. Maui has become hyper-commercialized. Native locals have been displaced. Luxury resorts continue to rise while the local population shrinks or is pushed aside. Land changes hands, especially after devastation, and something essential erodes along with it.

The spirit of aloha doesn’t disappear all at once, it simply becomes harder to breathe. If aloha is the presence of the breath of life (Alo and Ha), then on Maui, that breath feels constricted. When people say there is “no aloha” on Maui, they are sensing a collective gasping for air rather than personal hostility. The vital interconnectedness that defines the Hawaiian soul is being stifled by displacement, commercialization, and the crushing cost of living. It is difficult to offer the “presence of breath” to a stranger when you are struggling just to keep your own head above water.

Oʻahu: The Institutional Soul

Leaving Maui for Oʻahu feels like returning from a curated set to a living, breathing city. On Oʻahu, the pressures of modern life, the traffic, the density, the constant hum of industry are impossible to ignore. But where Maui’s spirit seems to be quietly receding under the weight of tourism, Oʻahu’s soul feels reinforced by its own friction. Here, aloha isn’t a performance for visitors; it is a survival tactic for neighbors.

Oʻahu still holds its soul especially outside of Waikīkī where people live, raise families, and carry daily life forward. It’s shaped by tourism, by Asian cultures, by military occupancy, and by generations of adaptation and blending. Yet even under those pressures, the spirit of giving—of shared life—persists.

Oʻahu remains the cultural and institutional center of Hawaiʻi. As the hub of education and government, there is a steady effort to protect and teach the true meaning of aloha not as branding, but as practice. “Aloha Spirit” is not just a sentiment; it is written into law. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes §5-7.5 calls for kindness, unity, humility, and patience in public life.

The Habitat of Values

Standing between these islands, the difference becomes impossible to ignore. Land can endure tourism, occupation, and shifting demographics but a culture survives only where its values are actively taught, practiced, and defended. Otherwise, it becomes only scenery.

The lesson of these islands is that values require a habitat. We cannot expect a culture of kindness to survive indefinitely in an economy of pure extraction. If we want the “presence of the breath of life” to persist, we must protect the conditions that allow people to breathe. It is not enough to write aloha into law; we must make room for the people who are its living practitioners. To do otherwise is to turn a home into a museum, and a living philosophy into a ghost.

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Right place, right time, right mindset.