Having just returned from Grand Cayman Island, I am experiencing difficulty getting up to speed, like a website selling Rockies tickets.

A fellow traveler from New Jersey expressed frustration after a Caymanian deli counter clerk served him moving in slow motion as if walking the ocean floor in full diving gear. The Canadian hotel proprietor smiled knowingly, "You just need to adjust to Island Time."

My family adapted quickly, but teenagers probably naturally lack urgent ambition; their bedrooms' appearance supports this theory. We slept and stared at the ocean, a force I suspect influences peaceful rhythm, the sense that nothing is so important you cannot sit for a few moments or hours longer until your flesh crisps like onion skin.

A local newspaper ran a front page story for three days. A woman in the early stages of preterm labor was advised by her doctor to fly to Jamaica, the hospital there better equipped dealing with potential neonatal problems. He wrote permission for her to fly in her seventh month. Unfortunately, she gave birth on the plane.

The civilized letter column debate focused on the public health service decision allowing her to fly. Buried in paragraph five was information no one addressed. The pregnant mother missed her scheduled flight when arriving late; she labored through the night and flew the next day. Later editions showed the healthy baby with her mother at home; despite the infant's hurry entering the world, she retained her birthright being born through maternal Island Time.

Oh, I know human ambition is more than cultural ADHD making us coil like snakes when a restaurant steak arrives ten minutes later than a companion's chicken or the traffic light takes too long to change. Driven people create great and marvelous things like computers and medical equipment and ways to get on and off islands.

Still, we cannot make the ocean, the sun and wind lifting bits of it into the air until you are surrounded with its hypnotizing power, walking beneath the water.