By Daniel Wirtheim, Features Editor

Published in print Apr. 8, 2015

The sign on the door is unmistakable. “This room used for meditation and prayer. Please be silent!”

Anyone coming through the door would have to see it, but still, it’s hard to find silence in the meditation room on the bottom floor of the EUC.

Last week was my first week actively using the meditation room, and for five days I took 15-minute meditation breaks, daily. I’ve done the exercises before—I’ve learned how to breathe properly and how to focus my mind—but I’ve never had the persistence to practice on a regular schedule. When I saw a sign in the EUC advertising the meditation room, I decided it was time to take meditation seriously.

The meditation room is a large, open floor room with a sandpit and several large, matted sheets of glass spread throughout, creating four small cells or enclaves on one side of the room. Nearly every material used in the construction of the meditation room is hard, so the slightest noise is exaggerated by reverberation. The first two days in the meditation room were the loudest.

On the first, I heard a group of girls studying in a corner. If I had my recorder I might have recorded them, but it hadn’t occurred to me that someone would be so loud in a place designated for contemplation. The next day I brought my recorder, ready to confront anyone who spoke—I wanted to shame the talkers into silence.

I wasn’t sure how to react when a woman and her crying baby came into the room while at least four of us were sitting in silence. It seemed too incredulous of a scene to even confront her. In truth, I felt bad for the woman. Whatever series of life experiences were causing her to act so disruptively must have been stressful.

The objective of meditation, as I understand it, is to block out the environment in search of inner-balance. This requires a lot of mental strength, and by the end of my first week, I’m still only able to focus solely on breathing for about two minutes. In between these two-minute intervals of focus, I’m thinking about my recorder, my stories and the people around me.

I can often hear an Islamic prayer coming from one of the glass enclaves. The prayers don’t bother as much as the talking, because they’re melodic prayers.

I keep looking for the girls who were doing homework on the first day, and I realize that so much of my time in the meditation room is spent focusing on this vendetta I’ve created. I want to catch them in the act, but I worry that I’m seeing myself as a kind of meditation room police unit. All I can do is focus on my breathing, hoping that my frustrations will pass.

I found myself alone on the fifth day, as the rest of the student body had already left for Easter break. I imagined them in their cars, speeding home with music blasting and cellphones ringing—a world built on sound. It was a little sad to be in the meditation room, alone on a holiday weekend, but I needed fifteen minutes of concentrated focus. If I have one major critique regarding the design of the meditation room, it would be the hard corners and the right angles.

Right angles are logical and calculated, far from the chaos of nature. Look at a photograph of the human brain; it’s impossible to find a right angle from any perspective. It’s difficult to traverse such an enigmatic thing like a human brain in a box-like room. I’m thinking about a better location for meditation, but I’m forgetting to focus on my breath.