Laundry Lust

I've got a delicious meal waiting at home. It's been waiting since last night, in the refrigerator. All I have to do is assemble it. And in 24 whole hours, there's been no time to do that. I had to grab a meal at a bakery tonight.

Time. We have the time to go to work and do a lot of nonsensical things that we'd never waste a second on if our lives were our own. And the things that are really important -- cooking a good meal, connecting with old friends, keeping our clothing clean and our houses in order, and simply relaxing -- get shoved into an increasingly tiny piece of our lives.

Rhumba and I are dull. We don't travel or do exciting things. We hang out around Santa Cruz and pursue our interests. Both of us had a three-day holiday weekend a couple of months back -- hope you had it, too -- and at work the following Monday, Rhumba's coworkers asked her how we'd spent it.

She thought. "Well... Boomer got through the laundry."

"He finished all of it?" "I'm down to my last clean outfit!" "I wish I could get through mine!!"

Rhumba expected wry remarks, and got envy instead. No one has time to do this stuff.

I've cracked a couple of books on Buddhism and Zen Buddhism -- okay, one of them was a comic book -- and the one concept that rings a bell for me is mindfulness. It's a form of meditation, but also a way of life. In mindful meditation you clear your mind of all thought; you observe but do not think. You simply become -- part of things. It's very calming.

Mindfulness extends to your practice of life. To live mindfully is to keep your clothing and living space clean to the best of your ability; gather food and cook meals carefully and faithfully; and to live right in the moment while you do these things, not in yesterday or next week or where you hope to be in five minutes. To occupy yourself with the task and nothing else. To become -- part of things. And then a chore stops being a chore, and simply becomes what is, and a great calm descends.

Sadly, I am not a zen master with a spotless house: I'm a bulky middle-aged man with emotional issues and a herd of dust buffaloes in the living room. But lately, I've changed my attitude towards chores. Because I've found that the more time I spend on the small things in life, the calmer I feel. Work becomes a meditation, an end in itself. I feel better -- and as a bonus I get a cleared-out closet, or a de-trashed back yard, or clean underwear.

The Buddhists have no lock on this concept. When I was young, plenty of older people felt this way about chores. I thought they were crazy. They weren't. But those were calmer times; modern life thrusts so many things at us, so quickly, that it's hard to completely dedicate yourself to any one thing for even a few minutes.

If you have the time this weekend, try a little mindful labor. Put some time aside from every other concern in your life to concentrate on one simple thing that you never get around to doing: one mantle full of dusty knick-knacks, one dirty kitchen floor, one weedy patch alongside the house, one room of dirty windows. Try it on for size. You might be surprised.

Me, I've got something special planned for Friday after work. I truly am looking forward to it:

After Rhumba and I get home and have dinner, I'm going to go upstairs to the office, close the door...

...and do the ironing.