Wash the Goddamn Dishes
A Newfound Creative Refuge in a Sea of Anxiety
I was lying on my living room floor.
I felt the cold hardwood against my back and my right hand pressed against my temple as if trying to keep my frontal lobe from bursting out of my forehead.
Thoughts ricocheted around my brain as I tried to deal with the week’s events.
Closing in on one year of unemployment. Job openings coming and going with none being a clear fit to date. Looming pre-school bills. The imaginary list seemed to extend from my temple and unfurl to the foot of my dining room table.
There was a palpable sensation of pressure in my brain. Have you ever felt that? It feels like your brain is swelling and pushing on the interior of your skull. Each pulsation generating an incremental amount of heat and friction which then serves to create more pressure and more friction.
If I were to enter a somewhat darker train of thought, I think this sensation is likely the ideal breeding ground for tumors and other neural maladies. Needless to say, not a good thing.
So there I was, struggling to contain a torrent of anxieties and internal pressures while lying on my living room floor.
What the hell am I going to do now?
I could lie here and wait for it to pass. Which seemed like an option at first glance but, like watching a meditation video on Youtube while a hurricane tears the roof off your house, it also seemed like an insufficiently proactive alternative to the maelstrom of free radicals running amok in my noggin.
I could holler at the top of my lungs and run around the room like a maniac. This would probably be a satisfyingly cathartic outburst but also an unlikely long-term solution to my current scenario.
No. Inaction wouldn’t do. Action with no purpose wouldn’t do either.
A thought struck me. Yet another item to be appended to the list, stacked tenuously atop my twisted and contorted body as if I were the Cat in the Hat balancing a dozen things while standing on a ball. We know how that ends. With a fish in a kettle.
The thought of the kitchen punished me. It was a disaster. An absolute disaster. Baby formula sprinkled on counters, bowls piled on pots piled on plates, tomato stains from the evening’s cooking exhibition, god knows what other types of debris and detritus were waiting in the sink filter. The image of it seeped my energy and threatened a crushing blow to my psyche.
Straw. Meet camel.
But what’s that? A hint of a glimmer of a ray of hope.
What if it wasn’t a crushing blow, but rather the solution I was searching for?
What if I got off my ass and started to wash those damn dishes? One by one. Brush that formula into the trash can. Wipe that damn counter until it shines.
Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, it is the definition of drudgery.
But at the same time, if you think about it, aren’t a lot of our most creative activities steeped in tedium? I think of Jiro keeping his sushi stand in an impeccable state of cleanliness. I think of John Wooden teaching his players how to put on their socks in painstaking detail. I think of craftsmen across the world savoring the drudgery of their art.
I realized that part of what has afflicted me all these years is a deep, deep selfishness. I think it was like a tiny parasite that grew from when I was a child, a spoiled third son of amazing, hard-working parents. A lucky boy with two older brothers who have been role models from the day I was born.
I always inherently felt as if this was the way things were supposed to be. And, as I got older, even when I paid my own good fortune lip service, that little monster, that selfishness, was still looming deep down.
It was there that night as I lay on the hardwood floor. It was the organism swelling my brain beyond its natural constraints. Where it whispered years before, now it screamed,
“You don’t deserve this! Why is this happening to you? You’re too smart, too good to feel like this!”
It was not a little monster anymore.
And it was then that it dawned on me that, yes, I felt entitled.
And I hated that.
And here was the solution, staring me in the face this whole time. When I saw the kitchen in its disastrous state, it was my sense of entitlement that sighed and averted its eyes.
“Later”, it said, “deal with it later.” And so it lingered.
It struck me that when this sense of entitlement dominated my thoughts, it was deviously natural to consume the efforts of others.
“Maybe my wife will clean it up. I worked so hard today. I’m so tired.”
If my own personal goal is to strive towards that which is higher quality and more creative, then the work must start here.
Now that I was finally honest with myself. I felt a surge of energy. I knew the issue and I could attack it.
The kitchen then no longer looked like a disaster, but rather like a freshly unearthed block of marble.
The art lay inside it. The creative mind was there to be revealed.
I just had to wash the goddamn dishes.
So I did.
