How wiping the toilet seat became an experience in timelessness
No matter what is happening in your life, if you ever ask yourself two questions, you will come up with the same answers. They are: Where are you? and, When are you? Now the answers are kind of smart arse, but nevertheless obviously true. The answer? You are here, and it is now. So, we have suddenly come across the wisdom of the age old saying: Be Here Now. And it’s not just a recommendation on where and when to be, but also a statement of fact.
It’s generally understood that there are three time tenses, or three When’s: Past, Present, and Future. Now in an attempt to dismantle this idea, to show that the present is the only thing really happening, and the past and future are only conceptions/ideas/holograms to help us think in symbols, we can ask ourselves this question: When does the future happen? And also, where is the past? The answer to the first question is, when the future actually comes around, it isn’t the future, but the present. To say it another way, a way that many pop songs have been written about making light of the fact, is to say that tomorrow never comes, and that’s right, for today is today, and when tomorrow is today, it’s not tomorrow anymore… it’s today. We can use this metaphor to answer the second question as well, “Where is the past?” becomes Where is yesterday? Yesterday isn’t anywhere, it’s a nonsense question, all there is, is now. There’s no room for anything but the present, and the present takes up an infinite amount of room, as it contains everything that’s happening (and not just in our heads, but the world, the planets, and the entire universe). To say it another way, the past is a record of what happened that we can think about now, and the future is an estimate of what we think will happen, that we can think about now.
Can we now more or less agree on the point “There is only now?”. Now you might ask, who cares? So what? And yes, fair enough. The subtitle of this essay eludes to the fact that there is a difference between knowing something as true, and experiencing something as true.
Look, I don’t want to come off as pretentious (maybe it’s too late). I didn’t write this to lecture you, or to show you that I’ve got my eastern philosophy down pat. I’m trying to establish some ground rules so that the following story makes sense at all:
I was thinking about time and the present, and specifically how I was timing myself everywhere I went. This happened on a Tuesday night after drinking a few glasses of red wine and attending a friends bookclub. I was getting ready for bed, which involved drinking some water, getting changed, brushing my teeth, turning the lights of etc etc very standard things. What was happening however, was that I was starting to get a little agitated (ever so slightly, enough to notice but not enough to be considered a bad mood) as I was timing everything I was doing to try and get to bed a little faster. What this meant was, I was thinking more about what I was about to do next, rather than what I was doing right then. This culminated with me brushing my teeth and counting each movement to time each side of my mouth evenly, but being so focused on the next brush I kept forgetting how long I had just brushed, making me stop and start again. Timing and clocks and seconds and how-much-sleep-I-could-hypothetically-get were becoming increasingly loud white noise.
I finished brushing my teeth, spat, and rinsed. I peed, and when I bent down to wipe the few droplets that had escaped the bowl it happened. Time disappeared, or should I say my conception of time disappeared, my concentration on seconds, minutes, pacing and one thing after the other vanished quite suddenly. It felt like I had been holding a great weight above my head, and I reached the point where I could hold it no longer, my psychic muscles gave in and let go. I continued wiping the toilet seat after it was dry and sparkling, I was no longer thinking about time, I had somehow dropped into the eternal present, each moment arising and disappearing in the same instant. It was like I had lost the “noun” feeling of the present (as a thing) and instead found myself participating vividly in the “verb” feeling (the doing of the present).
I kept running the toilet paper around the ceramic because I didn’t care about getting into bed at the exact time I had decided was ideal. I had also given up on timing everything to make sure I was “making good progress” instead, I was just focused on what was happening, in this instance the mundane and slightly embarrassing task of wiping a toilet seat with a bit of toilet paper. But, so too had the ideas of “mundane” and “embarrassing” slipped away from my mind (or at least the forefront) I was simply enamoured in what I was doing and how it felt. The movement was hypnotising in its smoothness and repetition. I went around and around, letting my mind go with the movement for the minute or so that I continued.
Now, I understand that this may all sound a little bizarre, even a little crude. But I think that it’s the fact that this experience happened the way it did which makes it important, because it’s rather ordinary and un-theatrical. Imagine how much more fitting this story might be, if instead of wiping pee off a toilet seat, I had instead been gazing into the eyes of a dying relative, that seems more fitting for a moment of insight and melancholy satori. Or perhaps if I had actually sat down to meditate, and after hours completely still, a new awareness suddenly blossomed inside me like a flower under the early morning sun.
But no, it’s precisely the fact that I was going about my ordinary life, completing bedtime tasks that this matters. This experience reminded me that it’s how we approach our life, not always the literal characteristics of events that matters. Simple tasks can be enjoyable, in fact they can be strangely transcendent, they can be perfect even, if perfect is meant to mean that they are exactly as they should be. My neurotic rushing around before bed was aggravating a simple set of tasks that could instead be enjoyed for the simple pleasures they endow.
And no, I’m not saying that brushing ones teeth or wiping a toilet seat is comparably exciting to riding a rollercoaster, skydiving, or traversing the alps of Switzerland. What I’m saying however, is that we tend to make rather arbitrary distinctions between some things as mildly pleasurable, and mildly annoying. Why is the first sip of coffee in the morning so grand, but getting lost in the dirty dishes considered a small nightmare? One could easily lose oneself in anxiety regarding the former, gulping down each mouthful as quickly as possible, not even noticing that we are drinking at all as we work ourselves into a caffeinated frenzy.
So why not experiment and argue that small tasks that improve our life (cleaning things like dishes) are actually enjoyable in their own way.
But before we go too far, this doesn’t mean everything becomes “relative” either, it means rather, that we can take a step back, take a breath or two, and commit to the sensations and experience of whatever is happening right now. It seems a lot more enjoyable that way, it seems a lot more real. To be present doesn’t mean that you are always in a state of enjoyment, being present means you are tuned into reality, you are drinking it in fresh and raw. It means that you are simply paying attention.