To a six-year-old boy, hospitals are more confusing than frightening. But Shaun liked this place, even knowing on some level he may never leave. There were the play-closets, for one: child-size doors scattered around the waiting-room where kids who never met could hide and seek each other while parents completed paperwork. Further into the labyrinth was a sprawling wooden house sized just for little ones, always echoing with the giggles of all but the few confined to wheelchairs, too weak to stand but smiling at the sight nonetheless.

Some time during Friday, I noticed I wasn’t feeling very well. By 9pm Friday night, I had a fever of 99.8 and an intensely sore throat and slowly aching muscles. By 5am Saturday morning, I had a temperature over 102 and felt like I’d just been accosted by angry bat-wielding thugs. What I thought was the flue–but went to the doctor for confirmation–turned out to be strep. The nurse told Jen I “smelled like strep” and after a test confirmation, I was sent home with a regimen that would have me feeling better “within 48 hours.

It’s interesting what happens when perspective is adjusted. I see conflict now as pointless, anger as a loss of self, a weakness of infinite depth. But Why? A push was all I really needed, maybe even for years. Scientifically, I know the brain is nearly endlessly malleable, and barring significant cases of genuine chemical or physiological distress, it can be guided to fit a specific end. In this case, I’ve long considered myself helpless to disrupt the cycles of anger that have plagued me since some of my earliest memories.

It’s a beautiful Sunday night in Illinois, and Jen and I have just enjoyed a wonderful pot roast, complete with some gravy I whipped up from the resulting stock. A nice night to relax with some hot chocolate under a warm fleece blanket with a fluffy kitty curled up my lap.. It’s a good time to reflect, recuperating after two and a half hours of exercising yesterday. A time to finally write up part of the outline I wrote while riding home from work one evening.

What is it like to feel satisfaction and know true contentment? To let the world and its ills flow past, through, and beyond. To smile in the face of adversity, of pain, of loss. To have that strength, to embrace absolute insignificance, to reduce any problem to a shadow of nothing. To eschew derision, find compassion for the hateful, and love the enemy that inspires progression beyond simple reaction. For years, I’ve felt on the verge of understanding the world–beyond the components that comprise the shapes and senses, past anthropomorphic callings of mental stimuli and instinctual urges.