Zen and the Art of Doing the Dishes

My first job in England when I was over in 2003 was washing and polishing plates and cutlery for eight hours a day.

Sounds like a shitty job, and I suppose it was, but one benefit was it gave me a lot of time to think about stuffs. Not things like, “Why am I in such a kak job!”, but things like the meaning of life and why hippos are grey.

The three months before I was promoted were like a crash course in Zen meditation. I would totally zone out, focus on my breathing (and on the polishing), and sink into that calm, ethereal ocean of the subconscious. The only time I took a break was to go for a smoke or make chef a cup of tea.

Chef was a bit of a bastard. If the plates weren’t polished properly (on the bottom too) he’d send the lot back to be redone. The meditation made it possible to laugh about it on the odd occasion it happened, which kind of annoyed him.

The most basic form of meditation is to count your breaths. Inhale and count one, exhale and count two (in your head, not out loud), try to empty your head and focus on the in and out of said breaths, and if you get to ten without your thoughts trailing off then start back at one again – or start again whenever you find you’re thinking about Liz Hurley naked or how broke you are.

This training has since made doing the dishes at home a pleasure. Lucy does pretty much everything else, but she hates the dishes and cleaning the kitchen.

The fact that I have no problems in that department helps her to love me.

All I do is pop some Travelling Wilburys or Wrestlerish (a kick-ass SA band) in the cd player and zonk out – and before you can say Buddha it’s all sparkly.

I think that’s why so many rich people are stressed out and miserable; they just don’t realise the value of a monotonous, menial, mentally-unchallenging job.

It’s the reason lamas don’t give a… well, a llamas ass about money and possessions. They know something we don’t – once you’ve found Enlightenment you don’t need a fancy car to be smug, and you can laugh at all those rat racers perpetuating their own misery.