What Is Pono?

Pono is the life, that wonderful life, you were meant to live.

- Ka'ala Souza

Doubt what you will, but let us never forget what is right. In every civilized society since the genesis of the human race, it has been considered wrong for a person to physically assault others, to steal from them, or to harm them in any way. There are laws that exist to protect persons from such behavior (which we call crimes), and laws to punish those who wish to do such harm to others (whom we call criminals). A good society attempts to legislate such that it helps protect its citizens from being victims of such wrong, criminal behavior but also to habituate its citizens to act virtuously. But putting civil laws aside, don't people already have some kind of learned sense of what wrong behavior looks like and feels like? And if they do, then don't they also understand what doing the right thing feels and looks like?

I believe that all of us internally possess a sense of what is right and wrong. It is out of this common sense (that which has been shared by the majority of humanity throughout history) that individuals find it possible to coexist in an otherwise chaotic world. But just being well versed in what constitutes thou shalt not behavior doesn't mean that the majority of people spend much time concentrating on doing what is right. The Pono Principle is the paradigm that makes that focal shift happen.

So many of our day-to-day decisions are based primarily on what needs to be done in the moment, with little (if any) thought to whether such decisions are for the betterment of our lives, let alone for the rest of the world. I will demonstrate how simply tweaking our decision-making process - by asking ourselves what is the right thing to do in this situation - can transform our lives forever. Should I eat a healthy salad for lunch, or a burger and fries from a fast-food restaurant? Should I exercise today, or skip it? Should I get in the habit of saying "good morning" to people I pass on the street, or simply ignore them? Should I pick up that wrapper on the floor, or assume that someone else will?

It is important for you, the reader, to understand that this book is not intended to tell you, or even suggest to you, what you should for shouldn't do in life. As pointed out by Louise Hay in You Can Heal Your Life (1984), the inference in using the word should is that you are doing something wrong. Therefore, I would advise the reader to stop asking questions with the word should and substitute the word could in its place. Could I eat a healthier lunch than what is offered at that fast-food restaurant? Could I make time to exercise sometime today? Could I develop the habit of saying "good morning" to people I pass by? Could I be mindful to start picking up litter when I see it? As Joyce so eloquently reminds us, "Could gives us choice, and we are never wrong."

Most people will say, "I already know that I should (or better yet, could) eat healthier, exercise, and be nicer to other people and the environment." Are you actually doing those things? Knowing what is right is a far cry from doing what is right, and The Pono Principle is your guidebook on how to act on what you already know to be the next right thing to do.

Live and Learn

We learn by observing the world around us, by attempting to understand what we observe, and by remembering those observations. What we refer to as life lessons are those mental, physical, and spiritual observations we have made over a lifetime, observations that have taught us something - a truth, a feeling, a belief. As humans, the gamut of life lessons runs from learning how to take our first steps by holding onto our parents' hands, to learning how to take our last steps by holding onto a cane or walker.

Part of augmenting our own learning curve is to witness how other living creatures learn. As a member of an outrigger canoe club on the island of Maui, I have been blessed many times in being able to closely observe the natural wonder of the seasonal migration of the great humpback whales. To witness firsthand a mother whale teaching her newborn calf how to swim, eat, and navigate the ocean is a transcendent experience. To submerge into their underwater world, and to hear the humpback mating and feeding songs being communicated through miles of ocean, is to witness the innate ability of these graceful leviathans of the deep to both understand and react to the message of these songs.

Through a combination of natural instinct and learned behavior, all animals (including humans) evolve, reacting to their environment according to what they know both instinctively and from observation. Oftentimes, trial and error adds a new dimension to the life lessons we learn. Teaching a child not to touch a hot stove may fall on deaf ears until the child burns his or her finger for the first time, only then understanding that the parental warning was not just empty words but sound advice.

But what we learn in life, about ourselves and the world around us, does not define us as people. The mass accumulation of life lessons over many years only amounts to an encyclopedic measure of knowledge, nothing more. That is to say, what we know (or even how much we know) has little, if anything, to do with who we are. The fact that someone can recite the Ten Commandments verbatim, for example, is a far different thing from someone choosing to implement them as a moral compass to live by. The true measure of a person can only be determined by how we act, based on the life lessons we have learned.

Walk the Talk

For about forty years of my mortal existence, I spent an awful lot of time talking about wanting to be a writer and even more time actually referring to myself as a writer. What was missing from both the former aspiration and the latter self-image was something called a completed book. The fact that you are at this very moment reading these words, while holding this book with my name on its cover and spine, demonstrates that I have just now earned the right to call myself a writer (and a published writer at that).

Some years ago, at a writer's symposium I attended in Washington State, I heard author J. A. Jance give what I believe to be the best definition of a writer: "A writer is someone who has written something today." Boy, that definition shortened the long list of self-proclaimed writers to a precious few. What Jance so boldly stated with her punch-to-the-solar-plexus reality check was that writers write. They don't talk about writing; they write.

In like fashion, for every person who has ever earned a college degree, there are thousands of others who have only thought about getting...