Zen and the Art of Anxiety (and dishwashers)

And other roadblocks on the way.

Yesterday a new dishwasher was installed in my kitchen. The old one frizzled out—taking my chopping knives with it, alas—just before Christmas. Coming when it did, durig that space of time usually occupied by cookie baking and cooking in general and that lovely winter time of just being busy in the kitchen, this lack of a dishwasher could have been a big deal, but it wasn’t. I’m well aware (thank you, All the Gods) of how lucky I am to have a dishwasher, never mind a dishwasher in a rental house! I’m also well aware of how much time and energy dishwashing can take. When you factor in cooking prep, and cooking, and then cleaning up after dinner when there’s only one person in the house, I’m often not out of the kitchen until 8 or 8:30pm. When the dishwasher broke I thought that this extra time would weigh on me, but it didn’t.

Mindfulness is washing the dishes. I don’t remember which book of Thich Naht Hanh’s I read this in, though it’s probably safe to say there’s a version of it in all of them. When the dishwasher broke, I took this to heart. In those waning days of December, the time spent cleaning after dinner began to take on that mindfulness quality. Water, soap, gloved hands in the warmth. Slow and steady and methodical.

Look, I caught myself thinking one night. Look at how slow and calm and wonderful everything is.

I’ve been thinking some version of this, more or less, ever since I came back from Scotland last November. The days have a wonderful rhythm: writing, dogwalking, breakfast lunch and dinner. Podcasts during dinner, space shows at night. Reading here and there and everywhere in between.

I love it. I feel so wholly myself, so completely able to stretch into the quiet and be with my mind and my soul and rest. So much of what spurred the move toward this year of leave away from work was focused on my Jess memoir, and while work for that is also getting done, I’d be lying if I didn’t also say that another part of what spurred the reach—the grant applications and the hoping and the dreaming and the reaching toward other possibilities—was the need for a prolonged period of rest. For time where I didn’t have to do anything, or be anywhere, or divvy up my day. Work, not-work. Meetings, not-meetings. Writing writing writing, even when that writing isn’t writing so much as it is thinking and jotting tiny little snippets down in the Notes app on my phone.

If you had asked me five years ago whether I considered myself an anxious person, I would have said no. And I would have been so completely, utterly wrong in that conviction. I have always been anxious—the kind of low-grade, humming, quiet anxiety that masks itself as productivity and a never-ending desire to please. It’s the kind of anxiety that gets rewarded in our society for being exactly the kind of people-pleasing fuel that capitalism runs on. And so I thought: no. I’m not anxious: I’m productive. I’m a can-do person. I work very hard.

This year away from work (even though it’s not really a year away from work as such, because writing is work, isn’t it? My chosen work, the work I feel I was put here on this planet to do) has been such a gift in so many ways, and one of the gifts it’s given me is that realization of exactly how anxious I was. (It’s a lesson similar to the way that pain, in showing us our limits, can also be a monumental gift.)

I’ve spent these last few months writing and resting and reading and being and feeling my heartbeat slow down enough to catch glimpses of the vast space that waits between our breaths. It has been so wonderful. Look, I’ve been saying to myself. Look how much you’ve learned. Look how far you’ve come. Look at what you’re now able to handle.

Then, yesterday, the new dishwasher got installed, and after the handyman left, I accidentally turned it on while it was empty. I tried to cancel the cycle but nothing worked, no matter what I tried.

It’s broken, I thought, instantly. My landlord is going to have to send someone out to re-install a new dishwasher and it’s going to cost her so much more money and then it’s going to leak all over the floor and wreck the floorboards and this is going to be such a hassle for her and I can’t handle this I should just move out right now.

And off my mind went, spiralling out into worlds vast and new.

It looks like a dishwasher, but it is actually an Enlightenment Machine!