Tenzin breathed in, slowly, and then out, just as slowly.

He was only thinking about his breathing. In...and out. In...and out.

His closed eye twitched. He had exhaled too quickly that time. He was trying to keep his breaths as even as possible. That was important to help induce a meditative state. At least, he thought it was important.

He breathed in, and then out, very slowly. Then he breathed in, just as slowly, and wondered if he was doing it too slowly now?

The floor of the Western Air Temple was so hard and cold. Surely that wasn't good for meditation? They should be doing this on a blanket or pillow or something. How were the floors on Air Temple Island so much more comfortable?

Another twitch. He wasn't supposed to be thinking about that. He was supposed to be thinking about his breathing. And then, hopefully, nothing.

He breathed in sharply, then breathed out slowly, totally not even, and then tried to steady himself again. His arms, held at chest-level with his fists pressed together, were starting to ache.

He opened one eye, then quickly closed it. Just enough time to get a glimpse of his father, sitting perfectly still, looking calm yet focused.

In...and out. In...and out.

There was a bead of sweat running from his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He tried to ignore it, and took another breath in.

The slight vibrations of his body made the drop slide down his nose and onto the floor. Which made Tenzin remember how hard and cold it was.

He growled under his breath.

"Tenzin?"

"What?!"

Now he really flinched. He opened his eyes and glanced at his father sitting across from him. He felt his cheeks burn.

"Sorry," he said quickly, looking away. "I'm just—having some trouble concentrating."

"I can see that," Aang said gently. He closed his eyes and straightened his back again. "Don't worry if you get distracted. Just calmly push the thoughts away and refocus."

"I was doing that," he grumbled, correcting his own posture. His father was using his normal, easygoing tone, which Tenzin found so annoying at times like this. It almost came off as mocking. Tenzin knew that he didn't mean it that way, but he acted like everything was so simple when it really, really wasn't.

Maybe it was simple for him. After all, he was the Avatar. Tenzin wasn't.

But Tenzin was...or was going to be...the last Airbender. Which meant that he needed to get this right, without any Avatar advantage.

It wasn't that he didn't like all this Air Nomad training. He enjoyed Airbending, reading the ancient texts and learning about their people's history. It was stuff like this that was stressful. Sometimes he envied Kya and Bumi, allowed to stay at home with their mom, unburdened by the crushing weight of a dying civilization. Or maybe it would have been better if they were Airbenders, too. Tenzin was a model student compared to Bumi.

And frankly...he had a hard time, interacting with his dad one-on-one. Having the rest of the family around would help break the ice. Even if Kya was the one making the ice, with Tenzin trapped inside it.

Tenzin realized, quite suddenly, that thinking of all that meant that he wasn't focused on his breathing. He exhaled, slowly. Then inhaled at the same speed.

Unfortunately, that breath included a bit of dust that tickled his nose.

He scrunched up his face. Breathed out again. But the tickling was worse when he breathed back in.

"A-CHOO!"

He sneezed with enough force to knock Aang onto his back. Tenzin's own body slid across the floor until he hit the nearby wall.

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Then Aang started to laugh.

"It's not funny!" Tenzin said, his face growing hot.

"It actually really is," Aang said, sitting up and covering his mouth with his hand. "Ah, that takes me back. I remember one time, one of the monks had a cold, and he sneezed so hard during his lecture that we all—hey! Tenzin, come back!"

But his son had jumped to his feet, hands balled into fists, and stormed out of the room with a roar of frustration.


Tenzin stayed in his room for dinner that night, and spent most of the evening trying to meditate on his own. His dad peeked in at one point, but only received a polite but terse request to be alone.

Mentally exhausted, Tenzin went to bed early. He woke up late the next morning, wandered out of his room, and was promptly told that they were leaving the temple.

"Huh?" he said, watching as a few of the Air Acolytes loaded supplies onto Appa. "But we're not supposed to go home 'til the end of the month!"

Aang grinned. "We're not going home. In fact, we'll be back here in a couple of days. We just need to make a quick trip as part of your training."

"Oh." Tenzin relaxed. For a moment, in the back of his mind, he had been scared—sure that he had messed up so badly, his dad had just decided to give up on him. Then he realized that he had still messed things up, if his father needed to take him on unscheduled side-trips from the trip that they were already on.

"Where are we going?" he asked, his tone both confused and gloomy.

He glanced over his shoulders at the Air Acolytes, then put a finger to his lips. "It's a secret," he whispered, bending down to his son's level. "But I think it's going to be a very important component to your spiritual training."


Tenzin stared. "This is a beach."

"Yeah! Bet you're surprised, huh?"

Tenzin kept staring. They had landed on an isolated part of Ember Island; nobody else was around, since rock formations on either side made it difficult to reach on foot. His father had his arms out to encompass the stretch of shore in front of them. Clearly, Tenzin was supposed to be impressed.

"Think of this as a little treat. Father-son vacation, just you and me. The Air Acolytes don't even have to know. Wouldn't want them to get jealous, huh?"

He winked, then waited eagerly for Tenzin's response.

Unexpectedly, this response wasthrowing up his hands, kicking the sand and letting out a loud, anxious groan.

"DAD! We don't have time for this!"

"Huh?"

"We're supposed to working on my training! We should be back at the temple!" he said, gesturing toward the water in the direction that they had come. "You know, working? I'm way behind where I'm supposed to be right now, so we can't just—"

"Hey, hey!" Aang said, putting his hands on Tenzin's shoulders and staring him straight in the eye. "It's just a little break, Tenzin. Breaks are an important part of training," he added brightly. "The sages always said, enlightenment flees from those who pursue it."

Tenzin frowned. That maxim was from one of the ancient scrolls, and Tenzin had reread it ten times, trying to puzzle out its meaning.

"Now come on. Last one in the water is a rotten platypus-bear egg!"

He quickly threw off most of his clothes and ran toward the ocean, laughing.

He turned back to the shore. Tenzin stared after him, a stony look on his face, and then sat down on the sand, assuming his meditative position.

"Aw, come on!" Aang made a show of floating on his back, trying to look as relaxed and cheerful as possible. "You're not gonna let me hog this whole, big ocean all by myself, are you?"

Five minutes later, it was apparent that yes, Tenzin planned to do just that.

Aang righted at himself, stared at his son on the beach, and frowned.

"Oh."


Tenzin had considered, briefly, that this was actually some kind of test. An important part of Air Nomad philosophy was that worldly pursuits drew you away from spiritual advancement. Tenzin is supposed to be working, his father tries to distract him with frivolous games, but Tenzin ignores him and keeps his gaze on his task. He had even read stories about this sort of thing, where evil or mischievous spirits tried to tempt sages away from their meditation.

But deep down, Tenzin knew the truth: his father was just a gigantic goof-off.

Once again, Tenzin was struck by the unfairness of it all. His father could afford to slack off: he was the Avatar, powerful and spiritually enlightened thanks to an accident of birth. That was how he had mastered all four elements so fast and so young. Whatever he had heard to the contrary, Tenzin could not imagine his twelve-year-old father buckling down and actually working at it.

Maybe that wasn't fair. Tenzin had seen his father act seriously, particularly when it came to his Avatar duties. But he sure was spotty about it. And Tenzin just didn't understand how he could be so flippant about things that were actually important.

He also didn't understand how he was supposed to clear his mind when he was starting to develop a migraine.

Maybe that was the test. Act as annoying as possible and see if Tenzin could muster the inner peace to overcome it.

If so, then his dad was a jerk.

He shook his head slightly, then tried, once again, not to think.

He heard his dad come out of the water. Heard him murmuring briefly to Appa. He took a slightly deeper breath, trying to tune him out.

After a few moments, he heard the soft sound of shifting sand.

Tenzin tried to ignore it. Eventually, after several minutes, he cracked an eye open to see what his dad was doing.

He was sandbending. Specifically, he was trying to bend the sand into a curving figure, but it kept collapsing under the weight. He also kept calling some water from the sea, splashing it on the earth to try and make it stick.

Tenzin opened his eye wider, trying to make out what the sand sculpture was supposed to be. All he could think of was a wave, like his father was looking out at the ocean and trying to replicate the shape on land.

Somehow, Aang must have noticed him staring, because he asked "What do you think?"

Tenzin scowled. He could have at least chiding him for getting distracted.

"What is it?"

"The Western Air Temple! At least—I'm trying to make the cliff, but it doesn't really work with sand. I bet your Aunt Toph could do it."

Aang sighed, and then, with a light stomp, collapsed the whole thing back into a sandy pile. Immediately the wet clumps began to rise, and his hands worked feverishly, molding a new shape.

"I'm gonna make the temple back home! You wanna help?"

Tenzin closed his eyes. "No. I'm meditating."

"This will help you meditate."

Tenzin's expression made him look uncannily like his Uncle Sokka. "How?"

"Come over and I'll show you."

Aang's tone had gone from playful to serious. Reluctantly, Tenzin climbed to his feet, wiped sand from his trousers and slouched over.

Aang had created a tower of sand as high as Tenzin's chest, with a few fringes to make it pagoda-shaped.

"Is that the right number of tiers?"

"Yeah," said Aang. He was still moving his hands, trying to smooth out the tower without causing it to topple.

"I think it's too many," Tenzin said, counting.

Now it was Aang's turn to imitate Uncle Sokka. "I designed the temple, Tenzin. Don't count the ones near the bottom; those are for the porch roofs. Now just—whoa." The tower cracked down the middle, but Aang managed to right it. "Okay, first pat that part down, then work on the details."

"What details?"

"Like the—gold designs between the roofs. And the windows! Just draw them in with your finger."

Tenzin frowned. "And how is this supposed to help me meditate?" he asked, rubbing some more sand onto the middle of the structure.

"Mindfulness...isn't just for when you're sitting down," Aang said slowly, walking around the sand tower. "Like right now. Keeping this thing up...is taking quite a bit of concentration."

"That's not the same as meditation," Tenzin said, etching sloppy window shapes into the sand.

"It's closer than you might think. Have I ever told you about sandalas?"

"Sandalas?"

"Well, sand mandalas. They're not actually called sandalas. Anyway, they were these really beautiful murals made of colored sand. The monks and nuns would spend weeks carefully pouring it into intricate designs. That's a different form of meditation. Sometimes, focusing on one thing works better than trying not to think of anything."

Without thinking, Tenzin nodded emphatically. He was still drawing on the sand pagoda, now with more care to make the windows look right.

"Is that really the same thing, though? It sounds just like...doing stuff."

Aang shrugged. His hands were mostly still now, spread out on either side of the tower, keeping the unstable structure balanced. "You have a hard time clearing your mind, don't you?"

Tenzin's expression turned sour again.

Aang chuckled. "Don't worry. I've never been very good at it, either."

Tenzin blinked. "Yes, you have. You've, like...meditated yourself into the Spirit World."

"That's a different technique. I think. Kind of the same, but..." He screwed up his face. "See, that's the problem. You can meditate, but thinking about how to meditate ruins the process."

Tenzin snorted. "Centipede-crab's dilemma."

"The point is...meditation is about clearing your mind and finding peace. And sometimes, you can do that better playing in the sand than sitting on the floor of a temple."

Tenzin thought about that as he drew the last few designs on the pagoda. Mostly he wondered if that was true, or if his father was just trying to justify this vacation. He figured the truth was somewhere in between, but hopefully closer to the former.

"I think I'm done," he said, scooching back to examine his work.

"Alright. And you know what happened when those sand mandalas were done?"

"What?"

"They dumped them in the river."

Tenzin blinked. "Why?"

Aang shrugged again. "It was supposed to be a statement about impermanence. Plus, y'know—sand. Just about the worst material if you want something to last. Anyway, take one last look at our temple, and..."

He relaxed his arms, and the tower collapsed. Then he crouched down and took a handful of the sand.

"Okay, this time we make something that can stand on its own. How about Uncle Zuko's palace?"

Tenzin felt some renewed doubts about this process' effectiveness, but decided to let it go. Instead, he forced a smile and got to work on the outer walls.