What a hospital room taught me about college

In college, it often feels like the goal is to add.

Add another commitment. Another role. Another line to a résumé. Another plan for the weekend. Another step toward whatever comes next. There is always something to join, something to improve, something to build.

It is not imposed so much as absorbed.

You begin to move quickly, almost without noticing it. Days fill. Conversations shorten. Even rest becomes something scheduled between more important things. The measure of a week becomes how much it can hold.

For a while, I thought that was what it meant to do college well. To be full. To be busy. To be always moving forward.

But then, in the middle of that, I started my chaplaincy training at a hospital.

It was, in many ways, the opposite of everything else.

Chaplaincy is the art of meeting people where they are. There was no résumé line being built in real time, no visible product at the end of an hour. I would walk into a patient’s room with no agenda other than to be there. Sometimes there was conversation. Sometimes there wasn’t.

There was nothing to add.

There was no way to make the moment more efficient, or more impressive, or more complete. The instinct to ask the right question, say something meaningful, or move the interaction forward was still there. But it didn’t always belong.

It meant accepting that some things are not meant to be fixed or even understood, only accompanied.

In one visit, I sat with someone who was in pain in a way that could not be resolved by anything I could offer. There was no advice to give, no solution to work toward. Just a reality that was difficult, and present, and not going anywhere.

For a moment, I felt the familiar pull to respond, fill the space, make it into something, anything.

But I didn’t.

We sat there, in a kind of silence that felt unfamiliar. It didn’t ask for anything more. It didn’t need to be improved. It only asked to be witnessed.

And that was much harder than it sounds.

It meant letting go of the need to do something with the moment. Letting go of the idea that value comes from adding to a conversation, to a person, and to an experience. It meant accepting that some things are not meant to be fixed or even understood, only accompanied.

Afterward, I realized how different that was from the rest of my life.

In college, there is always more to add. More to say. More to become. Even presence can feel like something to optimize. It’s another skill, another way to be effective.

But in that room, none of that mattered. What mattered was restraint.

In that moment, I could see so clearly that not all value comes from doing more.

Not adding. Not shaping. Not turning the moment into something else. Just staying, attentively, with what was already there.

It felt, in a quiet way, like a kind of resistance. A refusal to treat everything as something to improve or accumulate. In that moment, I could see so clearly that not all value comes from doing more.

Since then, I’ve started to notice how much of college operates on the opposite assumption.

I am less convinced now that fullness is always better than emptiness. That movement is better than stillness. That more commitments, more plans, and more visibility are always closer to what we should want.

Because I have seen what happens in the absence of all that.

I have seen that there is a different kind of attention that only emerges when nothing else is competing for it. There is a kind of connection that cannot be rushed, and sure as hell can’t be scheduled between your 2 and 4 p.m. meeting.

And I have started to wonder whether what feels like “too much” is not just the number of things we take on, but the constant pressure to add something to every moment — in order to make it useful. To really make it “count.”

In the hospital room, there is no need for that.

And in stepping into that space, I have begun to see how much of the rest of my life has been shaped by the opposite.

Sometimes, the most difficult thing, but the most necessary thing, is to resist that.

To stay. To witness. To let something, and someone, be enough without adding anything at all.

Maria Balhara is a student at the University of Pennsylvania studying philosophy and religion. She provides pediatric chaplaincy care through Clinical Pastoral Education at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and writes about medicine, ethics, moral distress, and decision-making during serious illness.