Practical Wisdom: You Never Know

The fluorescent lights always feel too bright in the waiting room. A stack of outdated magazines leans on the table; their pages curled at the corners from too many nervous thumbs. I sit quietly, hands holding the pages, pretending to read an article about fall allergies while my mind circles the real reason I’m here.

Four years ago, I lay in a hospital bed with tubes running from my chest. Surgeons had removed part of my lung. I remember the ache of each breath, sharp and insistent, the sound of monitors chirping behind me like small, mechanical birds, and the look on my mother’s face. I’ll never forget that look. Ever since that day, my calendar has carried one steady, immovable appointment: the annual CT scan.

Most years, I walk into radiology with a kind of practiced composure. The scans have become routine, something to check off each year. I’ve learned to tuck my fear into the corners of my heart and carry it like a folded note. But this year feels different. For months now, a pain has lingered in my ribs, low and stubborn. When I turn over in bed, it wakes me. When I laugh, it presses in. And so I arrive here with that folded note of fear wide open, trembling in my hands.

No one in this waiting room knows this about me. The man tapping his phone screen. The woman clutching a scarf too warm for the day. To them, I’m just another patient. Outside this hospital, I’m the one who smiles easily, who laughs, who teaches, who leads. Few know that some mornings I open my eyes and wonder about the years I might have or not have and whether I’m wasting my time doing things that don’t matter as much as joy and family.

When the technician calls my name, I step into the cold room, to greet a machine that looks like something from a spaceship. The table is narrow. I lie down, arms stretched over my head, and the scanner begins its familiar hum. “Breathe in. Hold your breath.” The circle of light slides around me like a silent guardian. For what seems like hours but is only minutes, I feel suspended between past and future.

As I walk back out into the world, everything looks the same: cars moving through the parking lot, people holding coffee cups, the wind stirring dust devils across the pavement. Yet I feel the weight of my worry and how invisible it is to anyone passing by.

In moments like this I think of all the invisible burdens moving quietly among us. The parent worrying over a child. The cashier mourning someone they loved. The friend who hasn’t said why they seem distracted. We never know the ache that lives in another person’s body or heart.

But I know this: when someone holds the door, when a stranger smiles, when a driver waves me in instead of speeding past, something in me unclenches. My shoulders drop. My breath deepens. For a moment, the heaviness I’ve been carrying feels lighter, as if someone else has picked up the edge of it with me.

Kindness is never wasted.

Somewhere today, someone near you is lying awake with their own fear. You don’t have to know what it is. You don’t have to fix it. A single act of gentleness…a soft word, a patient pause, a small kindness…might be the very thing that keeps their head above water.

Reflection for the week:

Offer one quiet kindness today to someone you don’t know. Then pause and notice what happens in you. Notice how your own heart softens, how your own breath eases. In giving that grace away, you may just find yourself receiving it too.