Tag: Dishwasher

My Be-Attitude

When I am doing housework, I usually wear my glasses, not my contacts. This is a self-defense measure: I’m a lot less likely to end up with stirred-up dust or other particles irritating my eyes if I’m wearing eyeglasses.

However, due to those very eyeglasses, for a number of years I found myself regularly fussing—essentially, throwing a mini-tantrum—each time I opened the dishwasher. This despite the fact that I rarely run the dishwasher more than once weekly, since, living alone, it takes me days to fill it. But it’s also my habit to open the dishwasher the very minute it stops running, in order to check that none of the dishes (especially the small bowls I used for serving canned cat food to my pets, or the concave bottoms of some of my cups) have been positioned so that they are holding water.  I know from sad experience that the drying cycle won’t remove water from a pet food bowl that’s flipped upright during the washing.

Unfortunately, opening the dishwasher at this point sends clouds of steam rising. And that, inevitably, means that my eyeglasses completely fog up, making vision impossible.  I couldn’t see a water-filled bowl unless it jumped up and slapped me in the face.

And so, for perhaps three years, I struggled to remember to pull my glasses off my face before I opened that dishwasher door.  Struggled, and inevitably forgot, resulting in stream of (Bad Word Deleted) language, followed by roughly yanking the glasses from my eyes and scrabbling for a tissue to wipe them.

As I say, this unfortunate behavior continued for almost three years, before one day it occurred to me that, after encountering the rising steam and being thoroughly wiped, my eyeglasses were much cleaner–the lenses, of course, but I also wiped the hot steam from the frames and earpieces, cleansing them, as well. And with this realization was coupled the sudden understanding that my repeated irritation was totally unnecessary.  In fact, it was contrary to good sense.

The following week when I opened the steaming dishwasher, I was prepared. I took off my eyeglasses and carefully held them into the rising steam, making sure that it coated and heated every part of the frame and lenses.  Then I carefully and slowly polished them stem to stern before placing the glasses back on my face.  By that time, the dishwasher had stopped emitting steam, and I could see and empty any dishes which were holding water before closing the door and allowing the drying cycle to run.

Instead of a rumpled spirit, I had sparkling clean eyeglasses. Instead of fussing and irritation, I was relaxed.

And all it took was a change of attitude and perspective.

It’s strange, sometimes, the small and mundane ways that major lessons arrive in this life. Something as simple as opening a hot dishwasher door can inform us of just how often we view things askew, making our lives much more difficult and uncomfortable than they need to be.

I sometimes now stop, when I am irritated beyond measure by some minor event, and attempt to apply the lesson I learned from my steamed-up eyeglasses and the dishwasher door. And instead of steaming up within my spirit, I often find a way through to peace and courtesy and calm.

It might not be on par with sitting on that hillside listening to a master teacher speak the beatitudes, but I’ll take my lessons where I can find them. I am teachable; I can learn to be the master of my own attitude.

 

 

The Dishwashing Analogy

I don’t wash my dishes every day.

This horrifies a one or two of my acquaintances. Oh, they might accept it if I at least loaded the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, awaiting a full load to run it.  But I live alone, and it sometimes takes me nearly a week to complete a full load in the dishwasher, especially when I’m in sandwich-a-day-mode.  Besides, I actually enjoy washing dishes—I find it peaceful and meditative.  So I carefully scrape and lightly rinse my used dinnerware and stack it neatly in the sink, until, after two or perhaps three days, I have a sinkful.  Then I wash them.

I guess there is something less offensive about having dirty dishes hidden out of sight in a closed dishwasher, for, as I say, some of my acquaintances find this practice appalling. But then, I am just as revolted to think of the mounds of bacteria growing and odors accumulating on a full week’s worth of dirty dishes piling up slowly in the dishwasher.

Nevertheless, I have sympathy for my friends’ reaction, since I myself once had a male acquaintance who strewed his dirty dishes, unrinsed and unscraped, carelessly across every countertop in the kitchen until he finally got around to washing them—and by “finally”, I mean after 8 or 10 days. The kitchen looked like the garbage can had exploded onto the dish cabinets.  There was nowhere to prepare food, either, since every horizontal surface was covered in dirty pots, pans, plates, and silverware, crusted with drying food and smelling like a landfill. And, yes, sometimes ants and worse insects discovered the unrinsed tableware and began to picnic on his leavings.  Needless to say, I never ate at his home!

Of course, this same man claimed that he could thoroughly clean his two-bedroom apartment weekly in just 20 minutes. It would have taken me that long just to scrape and rinse the dishes, but I didn’t argue the point.  It was, after all, his home, not mine, and I didn’t expect him to follow my personal rules on housekeeping—even if I did cringe and gag once when reaching for the toilet paper roll in his bathroom and seeing the porcelain holder covered in a paste of grey dust and god-knows-what.

But this makes me puzzle, then, as to why my own acquaintances feel it appropriate to criticize my personal dish-washing rules—especially as, if I know that guests are expected, I get all the dirty dishes washed and my well-kept home into a state even more immaculate than it usually is. The only people who have ever encountered my sink half-filled with rinsed dishes awaiting washing are those who dropped by unexpectedly.  What business might it be of theirs, I wonder, how I manage this household chore, and why ever do they feel  such a need to debate it?

And therein lies the real conundrum: that we expect others to do things our way.  Because, after all, our way is the right way, the correct way, the appropriate way.  It would be a perfect world if everyone just did things as we do them: thought as we think; believe as we believed.  (Possibly this explains the fact that there exist hundreds of “one true way” approaches to spirituality.)

Considering the dishwashing conundrum, I’ve decided that it might truly be a more perfect world if we criticized less and accepted more; if we shrugged and said, “Well, that’s not the way I do it, but if it works for you….” If we picked our battles and insisted upon being heard only when speaking about a genuinely serious matter—and, if, even then, we realized that so long as no other human being or helpless animal was being harmed by another’s decision, we should make our peace with that.

The Dishwashing Analogy might be a poor one…but it works for me.