Let me set the scene.
It’s a Monday evening in the middle of November. I make it home from work, happily down warmed-up left-overs, and change. The heat’s on, but it’s still a little chilly, so the WPI Superfan t-shirt is accompanied by some cozy PJ pants, but because I’ll be standing in the bathtub, the pant legs are rolled up to my knees, preserving warmth and simultaneously setting a daring fashion trend. I step into the shower, spray, wait, and scrub.
Oh man, there are sooo many other things I’d rather be doing:
- Beatboxing with my KP3
- Writing another blog post
- Clearing up my desk
- Making a sandwich
- Eating a sandwich
- Watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on Netflix
- Reading that book I started a while back
- Drinking a cappuccino
- Purging my inbox
Nope. I agreed to do this. So I should just shut up and do wha-
My head keeps racing, though. The thought of a cappuccino AND reading that book seems fantastic; such a simple joy, such an immensely better joy than the scrub-a-licious activity at hand. My appreciation for the value of an hour grows considerably while in the shower …not showering. It gets me wondering if I could exchange something I have, like money, for somebody ELSE to do this …service. Heck, James Bond probably doesn’t clean the bathroom. He also doesn’t ever GO to the bathroom, unless it’s to kill somebody. Maybe he sweats and bleeds it all out. Then again, he probably somehow pays to have other people do that for hi-
That’s when a phrase hits me. It grazes my elbow, but I get the gist of it. There is a life coaching technique out there where whenever you’re in a situation that is sub-optimal (mind the light euphemism), ask yourself:
How is this perfect for me?
Reframe that sucker. Dig deep to find that silver lining. Be creative in determining how this is actually good for you, like medicine. Start the unfathomable sentence, then finish it, like so:
Cleaning the bathroom is perfect for me …because… it brings me into the present moment and into my body (as I partake in the minutiae of scrubbing grout).
Sure, I’m panning for gold, but hey, you know what else I get from cleaning the bathroom?
Another blog post.
PRE-APOCALYPTIC POST-SCRIPT:
Let me set another scene.
I’m in the cafe I frequent. I’m not arugula a regular. I’m a super-regular. I’m sitting at the bar, where everybody knows my name. I’m not kidding. In my ear is a whisper. I say, “Thank you, dear,” and decide to append to the above with the following.
There was a cold fact: the bathroom was being cleaned by me. On its own, this fact is rather… impersonal, emotionless. Up until the whisper, I associated one story with the experience, then another. My first story was, “Dag nabbit, dog gonnit, what the firetruck, this is all kinds of no fun, and I hate my life.” My second story was, “Here I float on a cloud… ah, such levity and freedom… and yet I am grounded, connected with the rest of existence… wholly present in sensing every last detail of the current event of which I am an active part… oh, how wondrous is this life.”
Pffffffffft – just kidding; that second story was nowhere close to what I was able to pull off, but was the direction in which I was going.
The whisper shed light on how these two very different stories, associated with the same one experience, were two very different perspectives, thus two very different realities of the same one experience.
OK. Seriously. I can’t believe how much I am squeezing out of this. Cleaning the bathroom was perfect for me!