Sink Thoughts

What’s the best way to wash the dishes?

If you ask my 9 year old nephew, the best way includes putting on music in your headphones and he explains that we wash our dishes so that we can eat on clean plates. An added benefit, according to him, is “to get us moving and doing something” so that we can feel like we are accomplishing something. In “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh uses the seemingly simple chore of washing dishes to find presence in even the mundane aspects of our lives:

“There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.”

Most of us wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes. We rush through it, eager to get it done, thinking only of the next task that awaits us. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that when we approach it in this way, we are not alive during the process, completely incapable of “realizing the miracle of life” standing at the sink. To Hanh, and those who follow his teachings, washing the bowls and plates invites us to be fully present with a singular task.

Last week I made my semi-annual pilgrimage north. When I was a teacher, the summer offered a much-needed chance to recover and recoup my sanity which had taken quite the beating for 180 days. Now that I am no longer in the classroom, summer has become less of a desperate gasp for air and more of an opportunity to intentionally slow down, including spending more time with my family. This year I decided to extend my trip to about a month, starting at my brother’s in Southern Illinois. Not only have we been able to finally make progress on the bus build, but I’ve also been able to enjoy more quality time with my nephew.

Between reading in the front porch swing, enjoying the slightly cooler, less humid air, and sleeping on a surprisingly comfortable mattress on the living room floor, I’ve been mixing up my all usual routines. Despite not having a traditional “job” anymore, I keep myself deceptively busy with plenty of business and personal adventures. And in just a matter of days, I’ve happily adjusted to an uncrowded calendar.

Without my usual mix of rehearsals, meetings, the gym, and networking events, I’ve found ample time for casual strolls through a cemetery and cloud gazing in my hammock under a pine tree in the backyard. Much of that time lately has been spent doing the dishes.

Maurice and I are the sixth and seventh persons in the house, and I’m suddenly more grateful to feed only one eccentric and erratic mouth with an attitude and a dog. Six people at meal times presents quite the logistic challenge, and it always leads to a massive pile up of dishes.

The whole family enjoys cooking together, and we’ve had a wonderful time making chicken parmesan, buttermilk biscuits, and even homemade bread. But at the end of the night, one more foe remains to be conquered: the plates, bowls, cups, pots, pans, mixing bowls, tongs, spatulas, and cutting boards precariously placed in the sink.

My eldest niece must have drawn the shortest straw when household chores were assigned since it is her job to wash the dishes one spoon and fork at a time. As any good house guest trying to avoid overstaying their welcome, I gladly pitch in to the effort of maintaining the household. And this includes helping out with the dishes.

Standing at the sink with a sponge and some soap has never been my favorite chore. If I had to make a list of “greatest modern inventions,” the dishwasher would be on that list. The dishwasher at my brother’s house, however, has been out of order, and whoever is charged with cleaning up finds themselves in company with a wood-handled sponge, Dawn, and their thoughts.

Half an hour mindlessly scrubbing dishes certainly awarded me the time to get some thinking done, including reflecting on Thich Nhat Hanh’s wisdom of mindful dishwashing. Aside from the actual tedium of dish washing, I’ve come to enjoy these moments of quiet monotony. There is even a window to look out while my fingers shrivel and prune.

On Thursday, after less than a week of handwashing, I’d gotten pretty tired of the . With nothing but time on my hands and a determination to not wash another dish I didn’t have to, I decided to look into repairing the broken dishwasher. Interestingly enough, as I started asking around, it seemed like it had been broken for so long that everyone in the house had forgotten what was wrong to begin with. They just knew it was broken.

Naturally, the first step seemed to be to run the dishwasher and see what happened—that would at least catch me up to speed. I loaded up the dishwasher, turned it on, and waited for something to happen that could be a clue about the problem—a strange noise, flashing buttons, an error code, or even just silence. Much to my surprise, the dishwasher turned on and ran like any dishwasher I’ve ever come across.

Confused, I called everyone into the kitchen to see if I’d missed something. Surely, if it had been broken for two years, they would be able to tell me what wasn’t working right on the dishwasher that looked and sounded to be running smoothly. Their shock was that the dishwasher was fully functioning. My shock was that they hadn’t tried to use the dishwasher since it was declared “Out of Order.”

This got me thinking about what other parts of our lives we simply assume to be true. And how these assumptions can go untouched for years, often to our unknowing detriment. Household appliances aside, what unexamined “truths” quietly guide and shape our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors?

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” and this is just as true for dishwashers as it is for most of our problems in life. And the solution is almost always staring us in the face, if we would only take off the blindfold we tied ourselves. I don’t have a magic touch, and I didn’t break out any tools—though I was fully prepared to do so if needed. All I did was look at the problem from a fresh perspective.

A working dishwasher may help manage the daily upkeep of a large, hungry family, but Thich Naht Hanh gives us a framework for transforming a chore to be rushed through into a precious moment of mindfulness. Maybe I won’t convert to handwashing all the dishes from now on, but the next time I get to wash the dishes, it will be for no reason other than to wash the dishes, following my breath and being conscious of my thoughts and actions.

After all, according to Hanh, “if we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either.”

Until next time, live uninterrupted.
~Coleman