Folding Laundry
When I was a kid in Catholic school, we were taught about miracles, saints, and miracles and the power of prayer, etc, etc. (We were also thoroughly indoctrinated on the subject of sin and guilt). Miracles were supernatural events brought about by the grace of God. Water into wine and all that.
However, while folding the laundry today, where I might expect an accustomed habitual impatience, ‘hurry up and get this done so you can get to the next thing on the to-do list’, there was a surprising and beautiful effortless attention to all the details of the operation; sorting through the still warm clothing, finding matching socks, folding shirts and towels. It’s odd, but as I sorted and folded, what came up was the sense that this whole process was a miracle.
I had to sit down for a moment and take a look at that. A miracle? Really? How would you ever describe that? Something supernatural or beyond understanding? Folding the laundry is about as ordinary as it gets, right? However, for whatever reason, or maybe no reason at all, there was an absence of time in that process; a process with no process. There was no sense of a past and future ‘me’. I am trying to describe it right now, but of course, it can’t be described. Freedom? Emptiness? Presence? None of those words, or what they represent, can touch the reality of whatever folding laundry actually is.
What can be said is, in the recognition of the absence of an imagined ‘me’ and my concerns, life becomes easy, effortless, frictionless, and no matter what we are engaged in, folding laundry, doing dishes, answering the phone or typing on a computer, the miracle of life shines through…on its own, no prayer, practice or belief required.
What is required, however, is attention, attention to what is happening right now, rather than to what might happen, or to what happened yesterday, last year, or 40 years ago. Anyone who has sat down in earnest to meditate, for instance, can testify to the fact that the mind, the world of thought and imagination, is relentless. It never seems to stop! We hear about the importance of presence, but how is attention even possible? Maybe for a minute or two, but before we know it, we are lost, once again, in the time machine of thought.
The good news is that attention, or awareness… what sees the ever-changing field of thought, is never-changing. Once we become aware of awareness, and with patient inquiry, thought begins to step aside to make room for the present moment. And, one afternoon, while folding laundry a miracle happens.
How to resist the world and achieve exasperation: mardi 24 gueules 153 E.P.
When i am doing something that i have decided is undeserving of my attention, like scrubbing the bathroom floor, i realize, on consideration, that eighty percent of my forward energy is pushing against twenty percent of my reluctance. As a consequence, my forward energy speeds up in order to complete the task at hand. This is because the project is not important and needs to be done with. The result of these conflicting efforts is that i am deeply annoyed. I’m at sixes and sevens, or more accurately, twos and eights. There is a pulse, a flux, in the world, a flow and rhythm that events mark with a constant cadence.* Basically, it is a moderate walking pace for humans, 70 to 92 bpm. We homo sapiens, over thousands of years, have walked all over this world. Padding along casually at a stately pace, looking ahead wondering what’s over the next hill. It has served us well, this measured dance slower than allegro but faster than adagio—an andante saraband maybe. It moves, it sways, it swings. And that is why i’ve ordered a metronome.
The resting heart rate is around sixty beats per minute, or once a second. For scrubbing a floor, i might set the device to maybe eighty beats per minute, but i think any constant tempo would do the trick. Now i am scrubbing the floor, but there’s no hurry. I keep some attention on the rhythm, the scansion of the movement, the poetry, if i may be permitted a dainty simile. This simple attention might invite a more lively participation with circumstances, how to wander among the vicissitudes without the worry of confrontation, a zhuangzian nonchalance. Are you enjoying your life, i ask myself. I look around—there are little white hexagonal tiles scattered meticulously all along the floor. Someone went to a lot of trouble. Tick tock, tick tock, one thing after another.
Or maybe i should just hire a cleaner. There is a famous quote from Axël, a play by french writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: "Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous" ("Living? Our servants will do that for us").
* I suspect that this is a pace and pattern of movement that was initiated by the clinamen atomorum of Lucretius way back when the world began.
And who sees it all?