laundry

Have you ever had to stop and think about what you are doing in the middle of what you are doing?

I was loading clothes into the washer and had to stop and think. wait, is this a cold load or a warm load? Is that only those of us who have mountains of laundry in front of the machine? throwing in so many shirts and pants, that its easy to suddenly start mixing different loads? Or is it those of us that have already mentally left where we are so reality is no longer pertinent? As I loaded clothes, I was already thinking about several other things I needed to do at the same time.

When we were in India, one of my favorite things to do was the laundry. When we lived in an apartment in Delhi, we had a clothes washer, a dhobin, that would come to our house and gather our laundry. She would then take it somewhere and wash it and bring it back later that day. They don't have laundromats in India, so it was probably the local river that she went to and pounded out the dirt and rinsed them and then laid them to dry in the sun. The dryer was never the problem, because on a cold day it was 110 degrees farenheit. At least in July.

We traveled from Delhi to another city Pushkar. This city was built around a holy lake out in the middle of the desert. It took us five hours by bus, miserable bus, to get there. By bus, I mean, picture an old 1950's city bus painted grey and bouncing up and down over every rock on the unpaved road to this holy lake.

This was a city worth seeing however, it had motels made out of old castles and camels nearby. And you get to stay for two weeks and just enjoy the food and the other tourists and sunrises over the lake in very warm morning air. This is where I did our laundry.

I had a plastic bucket and a bar of sandalwood soap and filled the bucket with water. mind you, you don't want to accidently drink this water, but it worked for washing clothes. I would grab a few sweaty clothes from the hot day before and place them in the bucket. we had one of the motel rooms that was made out of an old fort. stucco walls and rotating ceiling fans. I would watch the sun rise and sit on the cool cement porch and wash. This is where I did my praying and talking to God. I would sit as the Indian women would when they would scrub our apt floors. squatting as I scrubbed. I would scrub all of the clothes, then rinse in fresh water, then hang on our porch in the warm sunshine. This chore gave me license to just sit and think. On the outside I was busy, being productive, on the inside I was meditating. Now, I long for that quiet. the warmth and the peace and time to just sit and think.

so now when I do my laundry in our high tech country. I sort the clothes to the best of my mental state at the time. I put them in the machine, add a powdered soap and push the button. The machine now gets the joy of doing the work with no thinking or meditating required. I then hurry back to my other chores to check off of my list.

Advanced society but no time to think.