Marcia’s Musings: My Love Affair
/This is a love affair you might never imagine having, or perhaps you will immediately understand. This one began at a young age and continues through to this day. As with most relationships, sometimes the ship sails smoothly and other times it encounters rough seas.
The object of my love? The normal, necessary irritations of life that reveal themselves through the mundane tasks that I have come to greet as messengers.
This love grabbed hold of me at an early age and became one of my greatest teachers. Assigned routine daily chores by my wise parents who owned a diverse family farm in Iowa, I grappled with strong emotions and feelings that would present themselves. For example: Doing chores required wearing several layers of bulky winter clothing and heavy boots with double layers of socks to combat the below-zero and snow-packed winters of Northwest Iowa in the 1950s and 1960s. In a time before the lightweight cold-weather clothes we enjoy now, these layers of wool and canvas literally weighed us down. Carrying pails of milk to feed calves or to pitch sileage into feed bunks took twice as long when dressed like the Michelin man. Grumbling about it, I learned quickly, never eased the load. I turned my attention, under the patient guidance of Mom and Dad, to the feeling of accomplishment and perseverance of doing the mundane well. That turn of perspective lightened the load.
I started to examine how the repetitive, mundane tasks of life – whether working on the farm with all it entailed or, later, attending to my own home with its demands for care and payments – felt in my body. The more I focused on the chore, the more aware I became of the emotions and sensations emerging. The more I listened to these messengers and companions instead of pushing them away, the more vital I felt.
In reality, human life consists of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mundane tasks: feeding the cat; walking the dog; washing, drying, folding clothes and returning them to their closets or drawers; grocery shopping and cooking; hand-washing dishes or stacking or unloading the dishwasher; gardening; mowing the lawn; shoveling snow; sweeping, vacuuming, dusting; washing windows; cleaning the garage; making the bed; paying the bills and balancing the checkbook; driving to work, on and on they present themselves for our attention and for our care.
They can overwhelm with their endless nature. We begin to ignore them, push them away, hide them from our plain view, pretend they don’t exist, and fail to come to grips with how we will manage them. Feelings of pressure, stress, failure, and other strong emotions play out in the background and create internal chaos.
If, however, we look at these mundane tasks as opportunities to focus on the present moment, our relationship with them often changes. By training our awareness entirely on the task at hand – let’s say hand-washing the dishes – we begin to see that this task brings pleasure – the feeling of warm, soapy water on hands – and this balances any resentment. When we complete the task, we can stand back and bask in the accomplishment. The dreaded chore, whatever it is, opens the door to becoming a working meditation of reflection and inquiry. It becomes a safe refuge in which we step back from the busyness and complexity of life and enter the inner realm of vast awareness and spaciousness. We find ourselves face-to-face with our True Self and a sense of connection that cannot be replicated no matter how much we crowd our lives with plans, appointments, vacations, friends, family, and careers.
Students who take our 200-hour yoga teacher training for personal and professional reasons express surprise when we assign them a month of work meditation. In this exercise, each one selects a mundane task they resist or resent. We ask them to simply turn their full attention onto the task each time they perform it and to observe the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that arise and to capture in an essay what happens to their relationships with mundane tasks during the month.
Almost always, they find the assignment deeply moving and meaningful, reactions totally unexpected from performing a routine task they long resisted or disliked.
I share with you a current student’s conclusion after a month of work meditation:
“Through work meditation, I felt more presence at cleaning than ever before. While making my bed, I noticed how each corner fit perfectly, the pretty yellow-flowered sheets, and how nice it was to have the comforter fit correctly in the duvet cover. While dusting the antique chemistry and dentist cabinets, I noticed the beautiful woodwork and hardware. While cleaning the kitchen, I noticed how pretty the new dishes looked on the open shelf. I feel I am seeing things differently for the first time…. It has been life changing. I feel more calm, confident, and happy…. What was once one of my darkest times of my life, I am starting to see a bright light.”
And another shared this conclusion in a paper entitled “Paradigm Shift”: “Today, when I do laundry or vacuum, I like to think there is extraordinary in the ordinary, but I am not trying to find the extraordinary. I am the extraordinary...."
This is not a come-on to sign up for advanced study or teacher training, though that journey sweetens life. It is a suggestion to turn your full present-moment attention to the mundane tasks in your life without judgment and with openness to what can shift and alter in profound ways if you stick with it.
I spent an entire November weekend recently padding around my Florida home and checking routine tasks off my list. There were some exceptional additions: putting up the Christmas tree to surprise my three-year-old grandson when he arrives; scrubbing the new walk-in guest shower until it sparkled and shone; reorganizing closets to make room for guests this winter, and stocking the freezer and the larder. Sometimes I caught myself grumbling and asked myself why. Sometimes I sat down to take a break from standing for so long and examined physical pain. Sometimes I felt a smile spreading from my heart throughout my whole body until the corners of my mouth rose, a response to the acts of service I was completed for others and for myself.
For me, mundane tasks spell opportunity – to evolve, to learn, to explore, to grapple and cope with life’s normal, necessary irritations, to meet myself face-to-face as if greeting a dear friend, to fall in love with all of it. In another’s words, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
