More Dishes.

Wandering minds, like mine, tend to assume that there is always something else they could be doing with their time. We believe in time labeled and leveled, time as currency in units of quality time, me time, down time, waste of time, and on and on.

Some religious people will add that "redeem the time" onto every bit of their life creating a kind of unrealistic pressure to how each day goes by. If you combine this with the myth of how God needs us and poor little Jesus cannot get by without us, you invent a weird religious fervor, a kind of multi-tasking environment that is leaves us fearful of facing things like silence, meditation, or words like "centering". (I am convinced the whole multi-tasking thing was created by some part of the economic system that wanted to squeeze every last minute out of our day and ended up manufacturing people who love to proclaim "I'm a multi-tasker!" but don't know how to focus, listen, or pay attention and end up ruining more than they accomplish in the long run.)

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, 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 Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh

(Note: while typing this quote out I had to stop myself from hurrying and treating the typing as something to get out of the way. Ironic, don't ya' think? Not like rain on your wedding day. Or the free ride when you've already paid.I don't know if Alanis got that right...mind you, she has said that she was writing a song about irony devoid of ironic examples...see how my tiny mind wanders and wonders in even tinier circles as I stare into the depths of my own spinning tea cup.)

Is it possible that by being alive to the tasks in front of us we are practicing a kind of healthy detachment from deceptive "worlds of endless possiblities" and a healthy attachment to allowing God be God? He will take care of all the other things. He may want us only to be available to His presence. He does not need us rushing headlong to "help him" because as AW Tozer once wrote:

"To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself."