Life’s Preciousness: Surviving to Thriving in Pangiamotu
TONGA
An 18 minute boat ride away, Pangaimotu sits amongst its neighbouring islands Manima and Oneata to the east and Makaha’a to the north. AIDAsol, the cruise ship that docked for the day created a significant swelling of sightseers in Tonga. The ship carried approximately 1600 passengers mainly from Germany along with a small smattering of other Europeans, as well as 600 crew from various countries. Most of the tourists spend 117 days aboard traveling from Europe to South America, the South Pacific and South Africa before heading back to Hamburg, covering 43 countries along the way. Talk about checking places off a bucket list! Equipped with three nurses and three docs, I recalled the times when I too had considered such a gig.
Life can be lived in so many ways. Do we wait until we retire to do a world tour or build it in piecemeal, do we home school or helicopter our children, do we contribute to community consistently or earn the means that then enables us to support our passion projects … do we find meaning and purpose day-to-day or wait till life seems to let us?
I’ve consciously pushed a few limits of mine on this Tetris style trip to Oceania - as in life generally too, I suppose. How else do we know if the edge of who we are has shifted … for it ought to, nuh? Standing at the lip of an active volcano in Vanuatu, unknowingly snorkeling with a baby shark in Tuvalu, having hotties help me zip line off a ship wreck in the Solomon Islands, swimming far and snorkeling solo to see the grand clams in Samoa and to top it off in Tonga, I catapulted myself off a stalagmite cave into a freshwater pool. There’s now a new limit that I reached, a little further away than what I might have thought was possible; then again, there’s also the ones within that are harder to get to, sometimes in spite the constant courageous re-examining.
Pangiamotu, this little nearby island, can be encircled on foot in 20 minutes at low tide. Unfortunately, heavy rainfall resulted in increased debris and decreased visibility. There once was a popular establishment called ‘Big Mama’s Cafe’, which is now in disrepair. The realities of what tropical island life gives - along with the beach scenes we lust for - is evident in places like this. Toppled trees, crunchy sand, stray animals, structures in disarray, items multipurposed and the list goes on.
I find it fascinating to be on the road and see the choices others make. Somehow, it holds up a mirror to the world I am (sub/consciously) constructing. Sometimes too, how you design your life enables me to see the monuments and mirages in mine.
Given the marketing, it’s easy to see the attraction. Soon after we disembarked I took the plunge, though snorkeling revealed more sea grass than I was interested in.
Some fish looked like they’d thrown on a dress shirt with the quasi jungle print commonly worn by elder aunties with outrageous tastes. A few baby fish were fun to watch. Though only a few centimeters long, they were in full character and colour, curiously chipping away at the patches of coral that were left. It was obvious that there was more underwater abundance and spectacle prior to the 22 meter high tsunami that hit Tonga in 2022 following the explosion of a volcano.
For a while, I watched sublime simplicity as a coconut rocked back and forth, the waves dictating its dance. Do we notice when the world shakes, shapes or sculpts our journey - and do we surrender to the motion of the Ocean?
Without jaw-dropping beauty, my attention was drawn to watching what seemed to be the ordinary, knowing that in a sense, I was witnessing survivors. As a testimony to this, Jean, one of the retired German passengers shared what Big Mama disclosed to her.
When she saw signs of that tsunami nearing, Big Mama (true to her name) climbed a palm tree 50 meters high, hugging the trunk and hanging onto her life ‘until it was all over’.
The preciousness of our package needs upkeep and instinctively, is one that we’ll likely safeguard at all costs. Just as I tried to picture the robust woman scaling to such heights and then holding on while the elements erupted, her story was corroborated. When I relayed this to my host Liz, she said ‘ya we heard about someone doing that on the outer island, I guess it was her’. While Liz’s preference would be to leave and swim with it, to wash away and land wherever ‘since Tonga is so flat’, Big Mama begged to differ. Having survived, she plans to never move off her home in Pangiamotu. Now, she and three others populate the island.
There was a celebration for the season and Big Mama had catered for the group’s outing. In usual South Pacific hospitality, those of us that were left on the island later in the afternoon were invited to join. Tai, a voluptuous Tongan personally came to each of us, encouraging us to freely enjoy their feast and festivities. As it usually is, the highlight of the day was the people and the snippets of their world that they share. We were offered the entire spread of roasted casava, aka manioke, grilled lamb, pig, NZ sausage, cabildo lu (fatty beef in juicy and dripping coconut milk and cabbage wrapped in foil), corned beef baked with tomatoes, yellow sweet potatoes and my favourite, gumala purple sweet potato with an subtle earthy undertone. All cooked by Big Mama herself, it was heartwarming to see her triumphant, with an air of resurrection as Tai proclaimed after he recited grace, ‘she will reopen again soon’.
I scanned the woman who I’d heard about surviving a tsunami with her bare hands, to the image of Big Mama that stood in front of us. Somehow, she seemed to be crossing the threshold as her tribe beckoned through those simple yet weighty words: it was a move from simply surviving to being called back into thriving.
I asked myself, if I climbed a coconut tree and experienced a tsunami, how would I live thereafter?
Most fortunately, almost all of us won’t be in her position (literally or figuratively). Neither do we need to await the health challenge, accident or other catastrophic circumstances that we may need to endure or witness before we take those leaps, push our limits, slow down, make subtle shifts or at least linger longer in gratitude and awe for the life we have in our grasp, in this moment - however (perfectly) imperfect it may seem. For all the micro choices we register on our radar, may more and more of our lives be in the thriving zone. After all if Big Mama could do what she did to live, so too can we honour and elevate the preciousness we’re consuming.
May we be blessed with safety, security, serenity and a sense of satiation from the life we (currently) have,