Chores, the Cheater's Guide to Mindfulness
Get into the present by getting things done.
I'm the eldest of five and grew up in a household with two working parents, so everyone contributed to the household chores. The neverending march of dishes and the piles of washing from seven people accompanied the demands of feeding the pets1 and keeping the garden under control.
We lived in heavily subsidised army housing in a military base and my dad, an infantryman, would quite happily wake us up at 6 am on a Saturday to mow the lawn "before the day got hot"2.
There was no dishwasher (well, you could make the case that from my parents' perspective, there were five of us), and above the kitchen sink was a small wooden plaque I read so often that the poem is forever etched into my soul:
Thank God for dirty dishes,
they have a tale to tell.
While other folks go hungry,
we're eating very well.
My good fortune, as highlighted by this short poem, wasn't lost on me. However, like most other children, I didn't appreciate the implacable firehose of incoming chores at the time. Alas, there was nothing for it. My folks didn't run our household as a democracy, and hence the path of least unhappiness was simply to get on with it.
Well, if Malcolm Gladwell is correct and 10 000 hours is "the magic number of greatness", then I indeed became great at doing chores. The investment paid off when, as a struggling young adult, I had an epiphany one day as I was slogging through a pile of dishes after a family get-together: the process of organising and cleaning the dishes had a calming effect on me. It was as if, through cleaning the dishes, I was also cleaning my mind of stress and anxiety.
After this realisation, I started paying attention to my inner dialogue whenever I got into any physical labour (or exercise), regardless of the intensity. My personal hypothesis held. Whether I was doing strenuous manual labour or organising my desk, physical work decreased the chatter and calmed the chaos of my mind.
It was a short step from awareness to implementation. Soon, whenever I started feeling overwhelmed by mental churn, I would turn my attention to my environment and find something I could tidy up or clean. Of course, I would not try to deal with big-ticket items in this way as that would likely be escapist ("staring bankruptcy in the face, Sarah took to cleaning out her dresser"), but it works wonders for those general feelings of frustration without a source or that unwarranted annoyance towards life after a hard day at work.
I am not a wellness expert nor a meditation guru, but I know what works for me, and it is this: to get out of my mind, I get into my chores.
It's a safe and easy way to be present in the moment, all while getting things done!
Do the dishes,
Will
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We had a small menagerie. At some point, we had two dogs, a few cats, rabbits, a hamster, a small army of bantams and a couple of glass jars that housed my female brown widows.
And hot it got. In Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa, it was not unusual to hit 40+ degrees Celsius in summer. At night, we'd get out of bed and lie naked on the floor to try and cool down, but of course, if you're naked, you're free game for the mosquitoes, so there was that.