Walking With Purpose

     I have noticed that children tend to wander.  When I was very young and lived in Connecticut, my mother ran a daycare in our house.  Whenever I got the chance, I would study the other children.  It does not ever seem like toddlers have any place they feel truly motivated to walk toward.  Aside from minor urges to go play with a favorite toy, children seem to have no long term goals.  Their attention span is short, which reduces the splendor of their dreams and ambitions.

One day I was taken from the other children and brought to the doctor.  I had been sick for a while and my mother was concerned that she could hear me wheezing when I breathed.  The next thing I knew, I was zooming through the streets in a red ambulance, accompanied only by two strangers in medical uniforms that rested me on a stiff white table with wheels. 

I wasn’t sure why I was in this odd vehicle without anyone I knew.  I felt alone and confused, but I did not seem to think anything was seriously wrong.  We arrived at the hospital as several doctors dressed in pale blue scrubs rapidly rolled me down the halls of the building while performing many unusual tests on me.  I remember distinctly that one woman gave me a shot in my forearm when my mother was nowhere around to hold my hand or without even asking if I was ready.

Through the chaos and commotion of being rushed into the hospital, I still managed to study the people around me and could only convey what I found when I had grown older.  Men and women walk differently from children.  Adults step with purpose.  Those who are mature walk with reason and perseverance.  Sometimes it can almost appear that even after adults have stopped physically walking, the atmosphere about them continues to pace onward toward the aspirations they have inside them.  Though some desires adults have can parallel to the smaller desires of a child, greater focus comes with maturity, separating the two age groups.

After the mayhem had settled and I had spent a couple of days in the hospital, people tried to explain what was wrong with me.  I had a severe case of pneumonia, where my lungs were filled with so much mucus that I was unable to breathe normally.  My condition was worsening and this disease could be fatal - a subject that five-year old has difficulty grasping.  All I knew was I could not eat because I was not able to keep anything down.  Also, being hooked up to so many dangling intravenous cords and complex machines made me horribly uncomfortable.  I had to stay in the same position on my back in bed for the majority of both night and day.

Once four days in the hospital had passed, I became so weak and bedridden that I actually forgot how to walk.  The only time I moved during the day was when I rolled on my belly and the doctor took a triangular, plastic object to forcefully beat my back with in an attempt to get the mucus out of my lungs.  The freedoms I once knew as I child to merely run around outside with friends had been taken from me.  I hated everything about where I was staying. 

The next day, my family came to visit me.  My mother had been sleeping in the bed next to me during my stay, but it was nice to see some other familiar faces.  Most of them pitied me.  My grandparents wished that I could give the disease to them instead of having it myself, though it did not seem to help me get better.  My father, on the other hand, went off and found a place in the hospital where people could borrow videos for patients.  He came back with a few tapes of one of my favorite television shows known as “Captain Kangaroo” in an attempt to make me feel better.

The somber atmosphere in the room generated from my family had not changed and I did not know why.  I loved that television show and rarely got to see it because it was never aired on the channels we had at home.  Immediately, I sat up and breathed with sudden ease, with sudden meaning.  In that magical moment as I watched “Captain Kangaroo,” I grabbed a piece of grilled cheese sandwich and began eating for the first time in a week.  My family became jubilant and overjoyed.  There was hope!

Looking back as a man, I realize that it was not “Captain Kangaroo” that commenced my recovery.  It was my peculiar transformation from child into adult or at least the beginning of it.  The show acted as a catalyst in the process because it reminded me of the brighter, more desirable side to existence.  My most effective remedy turned out to be self-motivation.  However small and insignificant it might have seemed, because of the struggle I went through, I was able to completely focus on the first long term goal I ever I had: to live. 

When I became healthy enough to finally get out of bed, I learned how to walk again.  From then on, everywhere I stepped, I walked with purpose.