The young man across the restaurant table from me closed his eyes and straightened his shoulders.  I sensed immediately that he was dropping his awareness into a meditative state and I followed him.  I normally meditate with my eyes closed but watching him allowed me to connect with him more closely and as he quickly dropped more and more deeply into a trance I felt myself pulled along as in his wake.

I had hesitated to accept the invitation to meet at this restaurant.  I knew only a few of the people at the table and the place is noisy.  It is a microbrewery and the high ceilings and hard walls make it hard for me to hear.  This was a group of folks who were just coming off a week-long meditation retreat and they were excited about and bonded by their shared experience.  I was afraid I would not be able to connect, especially because of the noise.

We all exchanged names in the foyer before we got a table and we made it through giving our orders to the server when we discovered ourselves at that awkward place where we wished we could connect more deeply but didn’t want to shout at each other.  It was at just that point that he closed his eyes.

Watching him I found the noise in the room fade into the background and we settled into the quiet and the calm that we can summon by our meditative practice.  We rested there together for a few minutes before he took a deeper breath and opened his eyes looking straight at me. He had sensed that I was with him but was surprised to discover that he was right.  We had only just met, had shared but a few dozen words, knew only each other’s first name and almost nothing else, and yet had shared this deeply intimate moment.

Weeks later we became friends on Facebook.  It was only then that I got a glimpse of the life he was transitioning back to as we met in that noisy restaurant.  I learned of the death of his lover and mother of their child and his struggle to raise the child even as he struggled to care for himself.  This knowledge put that shared moment in the restaurant into a deeper context.  He wanted to savor that spacious peace before returning to the “real” world.