What Could Dirty Dishes Teach You About Spirituality?
A quick lesson about choices and the quality of doing.
We live in a world of polarities, ups and downs good and bad, yin and yang. It turns out that the ‘quality’ of our life is defined by the choices we make on this axis of opposites, a choice between joy or frustration. This choice is often unconscious.
There’s a certain quality in doing things in grace and humility, even when washing the dishes. However, it is well known that people don’t like washing the dishes, it is a task we prefer to avoid. Clean dishes is life’s necessity and a duty that almost feels forced at certain times.
On average, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes to wash the dishes, however most people including myself use to do this task with a certain degree of frustration and ill-will. Trying to avoid the idea, postpone it, or do it as quickly as possible so to move on to other more ‘important’ things in life. This of course is an unconscious conditioning, an unconscious need to be frustrated. This because the dishes must be cleaned, and no amount of frustration or mental resistance could resolve or change this fact.
On the other side of the axis a choice, washing the dishes with grace and humility, choosing to do the dishes as an opportunity for spiritual reflection, for the joy of being. It will still be the same 15 minutes, but 15 minutes with a degree of quality, of being present, of joy. It is also a choice that brings the same results, clean dishes.
In a world of polarities there is a high-quality in everything that we can choose to do. Choose to wash the dishes with love, there is joy in it.
