Doing the Spiritual Dishes
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
It seems to be the nature of life that every now and then we are handed more than we think we can handle. Whether it’s one big thing or several small ones stacking up, everybody reaches their breaking point at some time or another. In those moments, we often just don’t know what to do with ourselves. We’re overwhelmed with emotion, with the weight of so much to deal with at once.
We know that eventually this will all pass, that the emotions will subside given time, but what is to be done right now? Isn’t there anything that can be done immediately?
The past few weeks have been difficult for me. I’m going through a break-up, my company laid off 10 percent of our workforce, and I’m oh-so impatiently awaiting medical test results. It seems like when it rains, it pours.
I’m doing everything there is to do – I keep myself busy, surround myself with friends and loved ones, try to extract what I’ve learned about myself, journal, pour myself into work and imagine a bright future. But I have too many moments when I just can’t do anything but burst into tears. The heartbreak is too great; the weight of everything is too much.
I went through very similar emotions when I first got sober. It was all so overwhelming, and when the loneliness became too much to bear I turned to a story a mentor told me. (Everything good I know I learned from someone much wiser than me!)
When she was having a particularly difficult time, she called her mentor and asked her what she ought to do. She was hysterical and went on and on about what she ought to do.
The woman on the other end of the line asked her calmly, “Are your dishes done?”
“What?” the distraught woman asked.
“Are your dishes clean?” the other woman repeated.
“No.”
“Go do your dishes and call me when you’ve finished.” She hung up the phone.
The woman did her dishes and called her mentor back.
“Do you feel better?” the woman asked.
“No,” the distraught woman replied.
“Is your laundry done?” the woman asked.
“No.”
“Go do your laundry and call me when you’ve finished.” She hung up the phone.
This went on for half the day. She did her dishes and laundry, swept and mopped, and dusted. At the end of it, the distraught woman looked around her clean house, finally calm.
The point? Sometimes there’s nothing that can be, or even should be done about the pain in our lives. Someone recently told me, “Holly, the only way is through.” Another wise person once told me that sometimes you just have to stand. There’s nothing to be done about the pain in our lives but to endure it until it passes.
None of us want to experience pain; it’s part of our biological make-up. We avoid pain because it is unpleasant. It is sometimes necessary, however, in order to grow. It’s been my experience that periods of pain directly precede periods of growth. There’s a correlation there. When we avoid it, when we try to cover it up, we often go too far. We’ll develop hardened hearts, character disorders, neuroses, or addictions.
When we can’t do anything to make the pain in our lives dissipate or even pass more quickly, the best thing we can do is to focus on what we can control – our physical environment. I sat in my ridiculously messy car yesterday and decided it was time to clean it. You see, I can’t do anything to fix my emotional messes right now. I have to go through them. But I need to do something, and what I can do is make my environment clean, calm and put-together, even if the rest of me isn’t.
“Doing the spiritual dishes,” as my friend calls it, is a way to distract us temporarily from discomfort and pain, as well as to improve our physical environment. A clean home or apartment will lend some much needed calm to a disquieted mind, whereas a disheveled physical environment will feed negatively into an already chaotic mental environment.
How do you get through the tough periods in life? What are your “spiritual dishes?”
Photo by quinn.anya via Flickr.
