Stay Loose

Sometimes, it's the little things. The other day, I was sitting in my living room in the early afternoon, just sitting on the couch with the blinds open and the sunlight pouring in. I was looking at my rug, which I had vacuumed the day before, and at the floor, immaculate and gleaming in the light. I was thinking how good it felt to be sitting in a clean room, with no visible dust, thanks to my (sometimes imperfect) efforts to stay on a cleaning schedule. Unexpectedly, a feeling of contentment and serenity came over me, and it was all on account of not seeing any dust bunnies under the coffee table.

I've never really enjoyed housework (and am not crazy about it now), but I do like the way I feel once it's done. When I worked full-time, it seemed like a real chore to mop and dust, but now that I've been spending more time at home, I've come to appreciate more closely the Zen of a clean room. Adding to the pleasure was the fact that I had done the work myself. If someone else had done it, I'd probably still enjoy the idea that the room was clean but might be suffering some residual guilt over the fact that I'd had to pay someone to clean up after me. I'd be totally missing the happiness of giving myself the gift of a clean room.

It doesn't sound like much, but believe it or not, it was probably the highlight of my week. Peak experiences come in all strengths and flavors, I guess, from the barely there to the resoundingly dramatic. Watching the light shine on a wooden floor may seem to have little in common with something like, say, reaching the top of a mountain, or even just watching a mountain reveal itself to you from different angles as you drive past it, but they're just different points on a journey.

Actually, I had the mountain experience recently on the interstate out west, and part of the marvel of it to me, then and now, was the fact that I had the capacity to see and respond to the moment regardless of anything that took place on the way to it. The mountain itself seemed to be saying something like, "Be hard, be immovable, be adamantine when you need to be," but there was also a whisper of something else, something like, "And remember how blue the sky was when you saw me, and how free you suddenly felt. Remember how my slopes gleamed in the sunshine. Don't forget."

Well, as Wendy Doniger has said, a mythologist needs both a microscope and a telescope. Sometimes you're looking at a grain of sand and sometimes you're looking at a mountain, but the important thing is to stay open, to retain the capacity to marvel, even though you won't feel it all the time.

Stay loose, everybody.