The other day as I read Bed and Breakfast by Lois Battle, I came across these lines. “’I don’t mind doin’ them by hand if there are just a few.’ Josie actually enjoyed the feel of the warm suds, the squeak when she rinsed the plates, the sense that she could make something visibly better in the space of fifteen minutes.”
In the early years of our marriage during the late 1950s, I enjoyed washing dishes by hand. I appreciated the time to mull over ideas, to meditate. Even after we started a family, I liked the solitude of standing at a sink to wash dishes. I still savor this sensation when I wash a very limited amount of dishes in our RV.
We weren’t among the first to buy dishwashers. I really saw no purpose for such a contraption. However, as our children grew; and we purchased our first dishwasher, I appreciated it’s ability to sterilize dishes. By the time our children were in their teens, I had one strict rule governing the kitchen. After supper, no one could return to the kitchen for something else to eat until after the kitchen was cleaned and I had left the room. Then, they were to clean up their own messes.
Therefore, a brief blurb in the April Good Housekeeping Magazine first surprised me, then made me nostalgic. “Rolling up your sleeves and making your way through a sink full of pots and pans may boost happiness and decrease stress just as effectively as meditation, recent research suggests. The secret to reaping the benefits: scrubbing mindfully. Rather than mulling over your to-do list while you clean, focus on the present moment, paying attention to the rhythm of your breathing, the sound of the running water, the feeling of soap on you skin. After six minutes sudsing this way, study participants reported feeling less nervous and more inspired than they had pre-wash. Totally devoted to your dishwasher. Study author Adam Hanley says other chores, like raking and vacuuming, may relax you, too.”
Other than in the RV, I don’t want to go back to washing dishes by hand. It may take me two days to fill a dishwasher these days, but I still appreciate its ability to sanitize the dishes. (Of course, our children tease us about prewashing all dishes before we load the machine.) Likewise, I’ve found other, more inviting, places to meditate.
But the blurb sent in me in search of this research by Hanley, a doctoral candidate in Florida State University’s College of Education’s Counseling/School Psychology. He writes, “I was particularly interested in how the mundane activities in life could be used to promote a mindful state and thus increase overall sense of well being.”
In his study, half of the 51 students participating in his experiment read a short mindfulness dishwashing passage and the other half read a short descriptive dishwashing passage. The descriptive passage was straightforward, but the mindful passage focused on being present mentally for the task.
The researchers found that people who washed dishes mindful of smelling the soap, feeling the water temperature and touching the dishes upped their feelings of inspiration by 25 percent and lowered their nervousness levels by 27 percent. The group that didn’t wash mindfully did not gain any benefits from the task.
A variety of medical publications have published these findings.
I encouraged all of my students to be mindful of details in both their reading and writing. In fact, students spent class time discerning details through activities designed to stir the senses - , sight smell, taste, hear, and feel - both by touch and by emotion. They looked out the window and wrote details about a specific object they saw; they smelled potpourri; they tasted red hots and remembered the taste of hot popcorn; they listened to the not so still silence of a quiet room; they touched various surfaces in the room, desk tops, concrete block walls, white boards, metal filing cabinets. And we responded to stories, both sad and funny. After each of these activities, they wrote paragraphs, always mindful of the details.
For me at the sink, I didn’t want to be mindful of soap or water temperature or the slickness of a dish. Rather, I wanted to be mindful of the scene outside my window, the solution to a problem found in the quietness, the opportunity to follow Brother Lawrence’s directive, Practicing the Presence of God.
Probably, one doesn’t really need to have hands submerged in soapy water to be mindful; it’s merely a convenient place to stop, be still and pay attention to some very important thoughts...and prayers.
2016
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