I offer my patients a glass of water or a cup of tea or coffee when they come into my office, which means at the end of each session, between sprinting to the bathroom and trying to jot down a few notes from our session, I’m stopping at the sink with a dirty cup to wash.
As I approach the sink with the glass or mug in hand, my mind inevitably fills with its familiar refrains.
I don’t have time to do this right now.
I’m too busy.
There’s not enough time.
There’s something more in need of my attention at this moment.
And, even – I’ve got more important things to do.
In some ways, these warnings have been the soundtrack to my life. They don’t come up just around washing dishes, of course. They can be the background chatter to almost activity I’m doing – even the very activities that I say I most want to be doing: playing with my kids, talking a walk, writing an essay. My mind will chatter along with its antsy warnings that I should be doing something else.
And so I wash the dish. Or at least, I usually do. As my office mates will keep me honest for – I sometimes leave them in the sink until the end of the day. But then I wash the dish. Unless I totally forget to come back and someone does it for me (bless your kind souls), but you get the idea.
Because what I’ve learned in the compiled 30-second moments of washing those dishes is that those moments carry a sacredness too.
One of the reasons I had learned to feel agitated by things like washing dishes – or wiping down counters or taking out trash or getting my teeth cleaned – is because I’d always hated things that didn’t seem to last. The things that you have to do over and over again in an endless cycle, that didn’t feel like moving anything forward but instead just felt like maintenance. No novelty. No progression. Just the mundane human-y stuff that felt required but uninspired.
But then I was at a retreat a while back where the leader was talking about our ongoing healing work, and she reminded us, “You can’t stay clean on yesterday’s shower.”
As I sat with that, I realized how much I had been hoping for my psychological and spiritual work to arrive in some transformative reckoning, some shower that would keep me clean and whole moving forward into forever. I, like I believe so many of us, didn’t want to do the daily maintenance work nearly as much as I wanted the big, beautiful breakthrough.
Said another way, we all want the mystical. But what if the magic is actually in the mundane?
The mundane is the pile of dishes in the sink. It’s the weekly therapy sessions. It’s the driving the kids to soccer practice. It’s the pause before responding to the email. It’s the offering to set up the chairs for the event. It’s washing your face when you’re exhausted. It’s deleting Twitter. It’s changing the sheets. It’s asking how they are and truly awaiting the response. It’s the annual physical. It’s doing the dishes again.
It’s the dirty work that’s actually the sacred work.
The mundane reminds us that in fact, there is no moment more important than another. There is nothing that is more worthy of our time than anything else. I’ll admit that I had a hard time integrating this idea when I first considered it. Surely my brilliant interpretation to my patient is more valuable to them than me washing their cup after session? After a lot of reflection, I’ve come to decide it actually isn’t.
I’ve been trying to take each moment of washing the cup to reflect on the person who used it, to imagine myself sending them love and strength. To honor the vulnerability and preciousness of whatever they shared with me. I won’t suggest I do this 100%, but I’ve been doing it often enough that I’ve started to love those brief moments.
And it’s got me realizing that these moments, too, are part of what I can offer to them. And if that’s the case, then those moments aren’t wasted or less important at all. They are offerings, in a way.
Just like washing my face at night when I just want to collapse into bed is an offering to myself. Just like pausing before reacting to the text is an offering to the person and myself and maybe to a slower, more regulated world.
Do I enjoy the big breakthroughs and the adventurous travel and a perfectly clean house? Absolutely. But I’m coming to see how they aren’t only a fraction of the time in this human experience, but they aren’t actually any more special. They aren’t any more worth living for.
Not when meaning can be found in the moments of stillness. In a new morning’s shower. In the cup left lovingly on the rack to dry.
