Washing The Dishes

I’ve been thinking a lot about agency over the past year or so.

During my 13-month, pandemic-induced (but thoroughly-enjoyed) return to my childhood home in Arizona, I was forced to reckon with a lot of things. While I’ll spare you the details of the other discoveries I made about the life I was living, I’d like to share some of my musings on agency.

I only recently stumbled upon the following excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh, but it sums up a lot of what I struggled to articulate for the better part of a year.

The excerpt is about how to properly wash dishes, but its implications span far beyond the realm of the kitchen sink.

“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us afterwards, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.’

What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink.

If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

The way I see it, the road we must travel to successfully learn the art of dishwashing — to shift the way we view what we do day to day from acts of helpless servitude to acts of intentional choice — has two bridges, both of which we must cross.

1. The first is to acknowledge the conscious choice we make every day to remain where we are (should we choose to do so).
2. The second is to reframe (and in turn reclaim) what we are doing. To view what we do not simply as a means to an end, but rather as a privilege of existence.

The dishwashing example speaks more to the second, but I’d like to step away from the kitchen sink for a moment. Partly because I’m trying to dial down my use of drawn-out metaphors, but mostly because viewing something as a means to an end is a luxury reserved for the few of us willing to admit to ourselves that we are the makers of our own destiny. The few of us brave enough to cross the first bridge.

To join this distinguished club of semi-autonomous individuals, we must first do the scariest thing of all — we must admit to ourselves that no one is coming to save us.

We must admit to ourselves that while it might not necessarily be our fault[1] for ending up where we are, it is (almost) entirely our fault if we stay there. It is our fault because we are the only ones capable of doing anything about it.

This cardinal admission, terrifying for more reasons than I would care to discuss today, provides us with the metaphorical cap and gown that signifies our graduation to the second phase of learning the art of dishwashing (achieving agency).

When we stop resenting[2] the cruel indifference of the world that (in a narrative sense) has delivered us to our current circumstance and, in turn, begin to acknowledge that no one is forcing us to show up to the job we hate or study for the class we aren’t interested in, something (bordering on) magical happens.

We grasp the pen. The same pen that we had previously convinced ourselves was being held by some other entity and begin to write the story that is our lives (only this time, consciously).

Once we realize that no one is forcing us to show up to the job we hate[3], we are faced with a question, the answer to which is almost always the same.

If no one is forcing us to do this, why are we doing it?

By and large, we do the things that we do (consciously or unconsciously) because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of not doing them.

If we don’t show up to work, we’ll get fired. If we get fired, we won’t have any income[4]. If we don’t have any income, we won’t be able to afford food, shelter, or any of life’s other necessities. If we can’t fulfill our basic needs as humans, we will be unable to go forth into the world and acquire the higher-order things that we long for (i.e. start a family, buy a home, win master chef, become a chess grandmaster, etc.).

To finish first, first you have to finish.

Now that you’ve reckoned with the consequences that would befall you if you stopped showing up to work, you have officially entered a new realm.

You are no longer showing up to the job you hate because you have to. You’re now showing up to the job you hate because if you don’t, you won’t be able to get all of those other nice things you’ve always dreamt about having.

Congratulations, you now view your job (the thing you spend around half[5] of your waking existence doing) not as indentured servitude, but rather as a means to an end.

That is what I call progress.

If that’s enough existential headway for you for one day, thank you for stopping by — I’ll see you next Monday.

If however, you still are intrigued by the proposition of mastering the art of dishwashing, let’s keep chugging.

While crossing the first bridge might feel like a worthy achievement, I would venture to say that viewing the majority of our existence as a means to an end does not exactly fit the criteria for success we have (hopefully) laid out for ourselves at some point or other.

I will concede that it is (almost entirely) unrealistic to expect ourselves to experience every waking moment of our lives as a miracle to behold[6]. I will however stress that it is equally unrealistic to expect that once we have reached an end (the cup of tea waiting for us after we finish washing the dishes), we will be able to approach it any differently than we approached the means (washing the dishes).

We are then forced to acknowledge that the “end” is just a carefully crafted mirage — a machination of our minds. For once we have successfully moved past the means, we arrive at the end, the fruit of our labor, only to discover it is not an end at all, but simply the means to our next end. And so it goes.

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

“If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

I used to characterize “growing up” as the treacherously slow and maddeningly painful process of realizing that no one is coming to save you. That sounds a little too bleak, even for a recovering nihilist like myself. So as a budding existentialist, I’d like to rewrite my definition.

Growing up is the wonderfully slow and utterly delightful realization that the true beauty of life is concealed in the mundanity that our younger selves instinctually overlook in the insatiable pursuit of grandiosity.

If we cannot live in the present without being distracted by the future, we will not be able to live in the future when it becomes the present.

We then become sophisticated renditions of our canine companions, chasing our tails, in search of something utterly unattainable by means of our current approach.

So here is to putting our dog days (pun most certainly intended) behind us and reclaiming our agency as individuals, not because we can or should, but because it’s all we have.

To deny ourselves the role of the chooser is to deprive ourselves of our own humanity.

We pay for what we do, and still more for what we have allowed ourselves to become. And we pay for it very simply; by the lives we lead.

Henry David Thoreau once claimed that most people lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he might have been onto something, but it’s not too late to prove him wrong. We, and only we, have the power to transfigure quiet desperation into careful creation.

We have the power to choose. That is the realm in which we still have everything to gain.

Here is to washing the dishes to wash the dishes.

Here is to drinking the tea to drink the tea.

Here is to leading lives of careful creation.

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[1] Although it certainly could be.

[2] The state of experiencing both anger and self-pity simultaneously.

[3] If you truly hate your job, I hope this makes you hate it less, but I would also encourage you to embark on a journey of finding one you hate less.

[4] Barring our $500 bitcoin investment generating 500%+ annualized returns for the next several decades.

[5] Assuming you sleep for 8 hours per night and don’t work in investment banking.

[6] That honestly sounds pretty exhausting.

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