Washing the dishes

My first serious contact with Buddhism probably took place in a bookshop in Seville in January 2007. I was accompanying a friend in the Humanities section when I bumped onto a sector dedicated to Buddhism. The most popular author was a certain Thich Nhat Hanh. In my ignorance, I didn’t know about the grandiosity surrounding that skinny funny-named Vietnamese. Nhat Hanh is a Zen master hugely recognised by his activism and his practical approach to social issues, having been nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr. due to his opposition to Vietnam War. I have chosen to buy the Spanish translation of “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” a brilliant book from beginning to end. As early as in the first chapter, he warns about the importance of living in the present, in a simple and poetic style (apologies for the back translation):

If, while we wash the dishes, we are thinking only of the cup of tea that awaits us or of anything that belongs to the future, or rush through getting rid of the dishes as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes for washing them,” and above all we are not alive during the time it takes us to do it. Indeed, we are completely incapable of appreciating the miracle of life while we stand in front of the pile of dishes. If we cannot wash the dishes, chances are that we cannot enjoy our cup of tea either; while we drink it, we will be thinking of something else, aware only to the fact of having a cup of tea in our hands. This way, we will be enraptured by the future, and what that means is that we will be incapable of living a single moment of our lives” (p. 38)

Today, almost three years later, there isn’t a single time when I am washing up that I don’t remember that paragraph.

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