Problem Solving the Human Condition

I ran all the way to the wagon like someone had lit my tail on fire .. but there was no one there. I dropped to sit on the steps and catch my breath .. cursing myself for a fool anyway. I was lucky I had missed them .. probably would have thought me a complete idiot had they been there... what would I have said anyway? I shook my head and rubbed my features beneath rough hands.

I swallowed the panic. That feeling within .. you either want to tear something apart .. beat it to a liquid bloody pulp .. or you want to talk about so much you think you might just crack open and spill all over the plains .. everything inside of you leaking out to leach into the soil until there is nothing left but a dry husk of skin .. easily blown away by the first gust of breeze and sent to topple over and over like those little dry weeds.

A few deep breaths .. slow exhales. That feeling slowly left me. Or at least it strolled off a ways and let me breathe. I had a suspicion it was waiting just beyond to sneak up behind me again. Like a plain's storm just beyond the horizon jumping around and flashing even though you can not hear it or feel it yet .. you know it is coming. Shoving fingers back through my hair I left the dweller's wagon and went back to my own wagons to get something to eat.

I felt better after I packed some solid bosk meat into my stomach and drank a gallon of bosk milk. Oren said I was growing again. I think she was just mothering me .. but I have noticed I am putting on muscle. Bulking out I suppose. I have always been lean. My shoulders wide but with very little meat on them as I grew up. For so long after I started really eating regularly I seemed to use it up faster than I could put it in. I suppose I had to get to the age where I started to wear it sooner or later. If I just had a little fat around the edged the cold mornings would not eat through to my bones so easily.

I threw myself into the work of clearing out a waterhole. It was full of debris washed from some other place .. the wood would be dried and saved though as it was almost as much of a treasure as the water itself. The silt and sand took longer. For ahn I felt the burn and exertion in the muscles of my shoulders and back. I grinned .. it felt good.

I guess it does not matter how many unanswered questions pile up on top of one another. How many frustrations and problems with no solutions stack themselves like walls around a man ... it all fades away with something to set your hands to and work on. Something to make you sweat and something you know you can accomplish with the muscle and sinew stretched to their breaking point. Nothing seems as big or as important .. nothing eats at you like it did before ... or at least as much. You seem a little bit bigger and they seem a little bit smaller in the grand view of it all.

It is not a perfect solution. I suppose it is not a solution at all. Just mental oasis where you catch your breath. Not a perfect answer but until I get a perfect answer to the human condition ... it is just going to have to do.