The Other Waiting Room

“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. All things are passing. God never changes.” — St. Teresa of Ávila

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear...” — 1 John 4:18

“Love Is Stronger Than Fear.” — Felicia Rose

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There are places where the things we tell ourselves stop working. A hospital waiting room is one of them.

I've spent more time in hospital waiting rooms than I ever imagined I would. Over the years I've sat beside family members, dear friends, and loved ones through surgeries, difficult diagnoses, and long recoveries. After a while, you stop noticing the televisions on the wall or the magazines on the table. You start noticing the people instead. Some are quietly reading. Some are working on their laptops. Some are praying. Some are staring into space. And every once in a while, someone walks out of an examination room and you don't need to know what they were told to understand that their world has just changed.

Recently, I was sitting in a waiting room at Wills Eye Hospital while someone very close to me underwent a series of examinations after doctors found a mass behind his eye. He had already been to a general emergency room. There had been an MRI, specialists, questions, and very few answers. By the time we got to Wills Eye, we were tired and unsettled. There was nothing left to do but wait for the results of still more tests.

Across the room was a young man who looked to be around thirty. A woman sat beside him. I assumed she was his wife or girlfriend, though I did not know. He had just come out of an examination room and was crying so hard that his whole body shook. His face was in his hands. She put her arms around him and held him. There was no effort to calm him down or make the moment less uncomfortable for everyone else. She just stayed with him, and he cried for a long time. Maybe fifteen minutes. Later, another woman came out of a different room crying openly as she walked through the waiting area.

There was something almost unbearable about watching fear become that visible. Usually, people hide it. We answer emails. We make dinner. We talk about the weather. We go to work and act normal. In a hospital, fear does not always cooperate. Sometimes it walks straight out of the examination room and sits down in front of everyone.

The 24 hours we ended up spending in the Wills Eye emergency room did not teach me that people are afraid. I already knew that. Fear is everywhere we turn. It is in the news, politics, movies, social media, our finances, our health, and the stories we tell ourselves about the future. We live with it so constantly that it starts to feel reasonable, maybe even responsible. We call it concern. We call it staying informed. We call it planning ahead. Sometimes it is those things, and sometimes it is simply fear wearing better clothes.

Sitting in that waiting room, I found myself returning to something meditation has been teaching me for years: fear seems to grow whenever I forget who I really am. I do not mean that as a comforting spiritual idea. I mean it quite literally. When I believe I am only this body, this personality, this history, this bank account, or this role in other people’s lives, then everything becomes fragile. Bodies fail. Money changes. Relationships change. People leave. Life rarely asks permission before rearranging itself. The more I build my identity around things that can be lost, the more fear seems to follow. At least that has been true in my own life.

This does not mean we should stop caring. I do not believe that at all. I have heard people talk about detachment in ways that sound cold to me, as though spiritual growth means becoming untouched by other people’s suffering. That has never made sense to me, and it certainly was not what I saw in Kathy. I came to see Kathy as a true Master. I watched her too closely to believe that detachment meant loving less. She loved with a depth I had never seen before. She was tender, direct, compassionate, and completely present. She did not hold people at a distance in the name of spirituality. She carried far more than most people ever knew. Part of the work of a true Master is taking on karma, and there was nothing abstract about her love. It cost her something.

What she did not do was possess people. Her love did not come from fear. She did not love to be loved back. She was not trying to keep anyone from changing, leaving, failing, or disappointing her. She loved because love was simply who she was. Through her example, I began to understand that perhaps love is who we are too.

For years, I thought meditation was mainly helping me become calmer or more disciplined. Those things do happen, though not always in the ways the mind expects. The deeper work has been something else. Over the years, meditation has gradually loosened my identification with everything temporary, often so gradually that I don't recognize the change until life gives me a reason to look.

Each morning, when I sit and turn my attention inward, I return to the Sound Current, to the Shabd, to the living presence of the Lord within. The mind may be quiet or it may not be, but after so many years the practice itself is no longer uncertain. I sit because this is where I know to go. It is where I have learned, over and over again, to return.

What has changed over time is not the truth itself but my ability to remain aware of it. I remember that I am not only the body sitting there. I am not every thought passing through my mind. I am not the concern that wakes me in the night or the story the mind begins building about what might happen next. Sant Mat teaches that we are soul, that soul comes from the Lord, and that its nature is love. Over the years, that has become less of an idea to me and more of something I keep rediscovering.

Meditation is remembrance, but it also reveals how deeply the mind still identifies with the world. I can know that the soul is eternal and still want the people I love to remain exactly where they are. I can understand that the body is temporary and still feel concern when someone I love is in danger. I do not believe spiritual life erases that tension. It teaches us how to stand inside it without losing ourselves.

My attachment is not gone. It is changing direction. Over the years, meditation has been moving my deepest attachment away from what time can take and toward what cannot be lost. I still love the people in my life fiercely. I still want good news in the waiting room. I still care deeply about what happens to them. But I understand more clearly now that love and possession are not the same thing.

Love does not become smaller when fear loosens. It becomes cleaner. I do not have to love someone through the constant terror of losing them. I do not have to grip so tightly that love turns into anxiety. I can love them as a soul. I can be grateful for the time we are given. I can serve them, sit beside them, drive them to the hospital, wait with them, and still know that neither of us belongs to this world in the permanent way the mind wants to believe.

The source of love is not outside me. That may be one of the hardest truths to trust because almost everything in life teaches the opposite. We look for love in another person, in approval, in being needed, or in belonging somewhere. We think someone else brings love into our lives. Yet the love we feel rises within us. The other person may awaken it, but they do not create it, and they cannot take away its source because its source is the Lord.

We are able to love because we are soul. Meditation does not put love into us. It uncovers what is already there. It clears away some of the noise, the old identities, the restless activity of the mind, and the fear that grows from believing we are only what can be seen. Sometimes, even if only for a moment, what has always been there becomes easier to recognize.

The waiting room at Wills Eye did not give me this understanding. Years of meditation did that. The waiting room simply showed me again how quickly fear appears when the body becomes the whole story. It showed me how helpless we feel when we believe everything we love can be taken from us.

It also reminded me how naturally love answers fear. At some point during those long twenty-four hours, two of my dearest friends called to say they were getting in the car and driving an hour just to sit with us in the waiting room. They arrived around eight that evening carrying food and drinks because we hadn't eaten in nearly sixteen hours. They stayed until we were finally discharged around three the next morning, drove us home, and then made the twenty-minute drive back to their own house. They couldn't take away the uncertainty. They simply chose not to let us sit in it alone.

As I watched the woman sitting beside that young man, I realized that love doesn't always arrive with answers. She couldn't fix what had happened or change whatever came next, but she could stay with him. Sometimes love simply refuses to leave, and in that moment, that was enough. Perhaps that is why hospitals have become teachers in my life. They reveal both things at once. They show us how frightened human beings can become, and they show us how naturally love rises to meet suffering.

The uncertainty of life does not disappear because we meditate. People still receive terrible news. Bodies still suffer. We still sit in waiting rooms hoping the door will open and someone will tell us everything is going to be all right. Meditation does not remove us from any of that. It gives us somewhere deeper to stand while we move through it.

There is another waiting room within us. It is the place we enter when we become still enough to listen, where the mind gradually loosens its demand for guarantees and the soul is remembered beneath everything that changes. I return there every morning, not because I am lost, but because I know where Home is.

I sit, I listen, and beneath the noise of the world, I remember.