I’m not sure when it happened, but it happened. I only know when I realized that I’d lost a certain awareness… a sensitivity to my state of being. I was no longer conscious of the thirty kids running around me. They carried my backpack as we walked; it hung below the backs of their knees. Upon exiting a house they picked up my sandals and placed them on the step before my feet. They dusted chairs for me to sit on. They held my hands – three in each.
I realized it in the mush pot, where I sat alone, children running wildly about me. Their squeals were drowned out by the loudness of my thoughts. I sat inian style, my hands on the ground behind me 
supported me. I stared below the squeals, beneath the pavement to someplace only I know, where my thoughts collect themselves into a mountain that I often climb. I find some nook and rummage around. I sat there in the mush pot.
Children are full of grins, but every now and again you’ll find one child that outgrins the rest. It seems to me that that grin is so full, so perfect, so majestic, that whoever sees it cannot help but do one of two things: smile or cry. One such child sat next to me in the mush pot. He stared at me full, with teeth majestic. He penetrated my solitary place below the pavement and destroyed it perfectly.
I knew then that I had to make a decision. I realized my situation. Sometime in the past week I had lost consciousness and it came back to me suddenly with the smile: I was in the mush pot; thirty children were playing with me; I was living out my dream in the Philippines, a dream I had planned for and looked forward to for years.
As I stared at that boy I remembered a prayer I had frequently prayed: “Lord, let my energy be so spent today, I want to give myself so completely to you today that I have nothing left at the end of it.” My opportunity lay before me. I could feebly fight this boy from my place, or I could abandon it and play helicopter. I smiled and did the latter.
