Zen & Copper Pots
I recently installed a system in our kitchen for hanging pots and pans. One day while washing up, I noticed our copper pots.
The outer edges of the pots were crusted with carbon build-up, streaked with grease and char marks. I’m not sure exactly when it happened but they looked tired and ugly. We had just finished reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, applying Marie Kando’s method to our entire house –and the kitchen was clean and sparse. So the pots really caught my attention.
I googled “natural method for cleaning copper pots” and discovered that you can mix lemon and salt together to form a cleanser whose chemical reaction will help restore copper to its original shine. I began to scrub.
And scrub, and scrub. I was at the sink for hours. At first, not much happened. Then, after a few minutes of channeling my inner Karate Kid I noticed that the charring was starting to give way to the underlying copper. I decided to use cleaning the pots as a meditation practice. I focused on my breathing, my posture, and my scrubbing technique, and over the course of several hours, the pots were restored.
Taking something that is old and grungy and making it shine is very satisfying. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to those T.V. shows where they fix up old homes and cars.
While tidying our house and cleaning those pots, I began to think about Japanese Zen Gardens. The way that monks shape rocks and plants into a microcosm of the world, taking a chaotic system and channeling it into something balanced; turning raw material into something beautiful and calm.
Cleaning those pots took sweat, repetition, perseverance, and observation. It wasn’t difficult. It was simply a matter of applying a technique, over and over again, continually observing the state of the pots until I was done. In doing so, I shaped my environment into something more beautiful.
I consider myself a beginner where meditation is concerned, and so my thoughts often wander. And while I was scrubbing those pots, I found myself thinking about Design.
Zen is popular among designers, and I think a large part of that is an aesthetic connection with minimalism and clarity. But Zen is less about an end-state (or finished product) than it is an ongoing practice. And the more I thought about it, so is good design.
When we make products, we start with something raw and over time shape it into something beautiful. Great designs are often extolled for being simple; essential. The process in common between making great designs and cleaning copper pots is centered around observation.
We observe, apply effort, remove clutter, and repeat. At some point we decide to stop. An artifact remains, and we are ‘finished’. In the larger scale, our body of work is a continuum of this process — arguably the true work. The products are secondary, the process is everything. By being true to our process, by continually bringing our focus back to our breathing, to our posture, and to observing the world as it exists in this particular moment — we can shape the world into a beautiful place.
Those pots didn’t just look better when I was finished with them — they conducted heat much more quickly (and evenly), and actually made cooking easier. It’s been a few months, and they’re starting to look a little ragged again…
