It’s funny how writing can be a chore, and chores can be writing

Published September 6, 2024

A long time ago, I visited a priest who was in transitional housing after weeks of treatment for alcoholism. Washing cars and dishes and other chores were mandated daily responsibilities. Later that year, I became a seminary student and got a small taste of that, mostly by pulling weeds, and a close look at how the Benedictine monks there took that to another level.

Two years later, I saw “The Razor’s Edge” and a version of the same in different settings. Monasteries and monks, Benedictine and Buddhist, and although Bill Murray’s Larry Darrell hit painfully wrong notes to many who knew the role from Tyrone Power’s portrayal or from William Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel, I still got the gist. Maybe it helped that I was more ready to receive reinforcement for that subtext than to focus too much on anything else.

(There is at least another blog post or two possible about how Murray and John Byrum wrote the screenplay for the 1984 version of the film, and even how the movie came to be. Hint: Without Murray’s appearance in “Ghostbusters,” it probably wouldn’t have been made.)

So it was interesting to see “The Household Chores You’re Avoiding Are Key to a Deeper Life,” an opinion piece in The New York Times. This part is when dishpan hands and soap scents from long ago called to me in something of a reverse Proustian way.

It wasn’t until I read “The Wisdom Way of Knowing,” by Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, that I began to wonder if something was getting lost in our culture’s emphasis on time management. In the book, Ms. Bourgeault describes her rationale for how she organized a retreat for participants seeking to deepen their spirituality: “On Eagle Island, certainly, we could have doubled the instructional time and hired out the cooking and chores. It would have been vastly more efficient. The only problem — at least if the road maps we were following are correct — is that none of the sacred alchemy would have taken place.”

I nodded as I read what followed:

Such an idea isn’t new; it finds its roots in many ancient spiritual traditions, including the Christian tradition of the Benedictine monastic order. Indeed, it lies at the heart of the unofficial Latin motto of the Benedictines, “Ora et labora” (“pray and work”).

My life experience is not the same as that of Lydia Sohn, the United Methodist minister and writer who authored the opinion piece, but a lot of her essay spoke to me. Especially this part:

I am indebted to her for instilling confidence in me to take on a new role at a time when any more responsibilities seemed especially daunting. “I find that being a mom makes me a better professor,” she said. “The time away from work, when I’m with the kids, watching them at the playground or folding their laundry, is where my brain synthesizes all the information I receive at work or come up with ideas for my writing and research.” Her words instantly resonated with me. The idea for a book struck me like a lightning bolt when I was out on a walk with my newborn. I figured out a way forward in a gridlocked argument with my mom while I was washing the dishes.

This reminded me of a time when I was lucky enough to have regular access to a pool and would swim as often as my newspaper schedule would allow (which was not nearly often enough). To my astonishment, what was meant to refresh me and be more an aid for my body than for my mind seemed to wake up areas of my brain. Ideas for stories and columns started coming to me as I swam. I began to place a digital recorder on a towel near the pool’s edge so I could dictate notes to myself while the ideas were still fresh.

My focus was so good I didn’t notice when people were playing tennis on nearby courts.

Ms. Sohn had me nodding in agreement again when she wrote of her belief “that my private sphere is just as worthy of my attention as my public sphere and that my inner life is just as worthy of my care and labor as my outer one. And with each sock I put away, I trust that a sacred alchemy is unfurling.”

I don’t wash dishes now. I live a life of paper plates and compostable cutlery, and it would take too long to explain why. I live the life of someone in transitional housing who could be gone next week. Never mind the reasons. When my body and its medical mysteries let me, I dust and clean, tumble downstairs and wash clothes and bedding, spruce up what I can.

The rest of my thoughts about this will remain private. They remind me that I lived the wrong life, and amid heightened attempts to keep me from having the peace of the most correct ending possible, I can spend only so much time at plot points from my past before they become a painful itch that’s unwise to scratch.

Featured image by Turac Novruzova via iStock.

 

One thought on “It’s funny how writing can be a chore, and chores can be writing”

  1. Dee Brandt

    You are incredible writer. I wish, again, you would write a book about your transition.
    And, I’m curious about that idea for a book you mentioned in an earlier column.

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