I sit here, with my head in my hands. I can hear the birds to my left, and the occasional laughter of children at a playground somewhere.

As I cycle through the morning's events again and again, I feel the anxiety that has built up. My heart is racing, my gut feels twisted and volatile. I feel my fingers shaking against my forehead.

I struggle to find order in my mind, as the electric tap dance of emotions scrambles my thoughts.

The future made sense yesterday. It was clear, it made me feel secure, but it's gone now.

In my emotional, reactive haze, everything is blurry. I am sure that nothing here can help me. I understand that my emotions put me into an irrational state. My perspective of everything around me right now is skewed and wrong. I can't trust the present.

This leaves me with the past. My anchor to rationality, my path to this existence. I think of my parents, brothers and sisters. I think of friends, and school. I remember hunting, and swimming, and feeling alive. A few events come to mind that spark some familiarity, hints of solid ground just out of reach in this opaque haze.

"I'm trying too hard."

The self-inflicted stress overwhelms me. I am sure there is a solution to this. I am human, I am intelligent. I can analyze, abstract, consider all the angles. I am able to consciously overcome this, if I can dig through the information and find the peace I need right now. I rub my temples, dig deeper into the chaos in my mind. I can't breathe. The harder I hunt for an answer, the farther away it feels.

Short of breath, I sit up, and consider my surroundings. Birds, puddles from an earlier rain, sunshine, an old weathered tree, a cool breeze...

Balance.

I stretch my arms up above me, I breathe in.

The birds have moved away from me. They aren't emotional. Winged bricks, they just exist. They each have exactly enough influence to keep them together and alive. Their instinct is their mortar. Their collective existence is a balanced structure, whose value is somehow greater than the sum it's individual parts. Exactly the right combination of instinct and behavior to flock, facilitating their survival.

The sidewalk catches my eye. Broken, some sections had been re-poured, and broken again, the concrete path that brought me here has been through years of rigor. Directly in front of me, the root of a tree can be seen within a large crack in the walk. I consider the slow, persistent growth of the tree that, with time, overpowered the strength of the concrete. I stare at the root, eventually following it to an old tree.

The golden leaves remind me that the summer is gone. I follow one as it falls down, dancing in the breeze, softly landing in a large puddle. A subtle ripple of water makes it's way across the surface, gently rocking other leaves along the way. The concentric pattern of the waves project outward from the single event, taking the path of least resistance, the path that comes most-natural, a perfect circle.

A moment of mental peace and clarity, I exhale.

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