Buddhists say, more or less, that if one is unhappy while doing the dishes, then one isn’t really doing the dishes at all. When I was cleaning up this evening, I wasn’t exactly unhappy, but I was distracted by a few thoughts. Such as “What do we remember learning? And how does it help or hinder us as we grow?” When I was little, I played with childish things. Now that I’m older… Well anyway, we don’t have a dishwasher, so I was up to my elbows in suds.
One of the challenges of washing dishes for a family of four is fitting all the clean dishes into the dish rack to dry. I do not believe in hand drying the dishes at night. Why not let them dry on their own and put them away in the morning? Often, though, there isn’t enough room in the rack for all the dishes, and I’m forced to stop and dry a few. Tonight, I happened to have washed all the smaller cups and kids bowls before I got to the big pots and pans. As I did this, I noticed that I had plenty of room to pile those on top of the others.
This notion of putting the smaller items in the rack first contradicted a lesson I’ve been holding onto for all my life. When I was a child and I had to put away my Lincoln Logs, I learned that the only way to get the pile of them back into the can was to put the big ones in the first. Tonight I discovered that we can learn more by dropping the lessons of our youth. Sometimes the opposite of what you know is best.