The Zen of Dishes

Cooking is well and good, but when I started out, I hated doing dishes. That was one of the big draws to eating out, in a way, was that you just go, pick something, someone brings it out prepared, you eat and pay and that's it. No dishes. When you eat at home, though, there's a big pile of dishes. The pile is so big, sometimes it's hard to know how it got that big. What to do?

Well there's a few things. Mostly one has to look at dishes from a philosophical perspective. When they're there and you have to do them, and you'd rather do something else, they don't just go away. In fact, for me, when they're sitting there, they cause more trouble than washing them. I hate having dirty dishes sitting in the sink.

I read Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain a few years back



it's a blast --- anyone who likes cooking should read it. He talks about a restaurant where the head chef came by where a junior chef was cooking and the station was not immaculate. The head chef pressed his palm into the crumbs or whatever was on the station, then held his palm up to the junior chef and said ``this is your mind.'' Which sums it up exactly. Another quote that comes to me is Glenn Gould, who said that you don't play the piano with your fingers, you play it with your mind..

So anyway, how clean my kitchen is reflects how my mind is working. If there's something messy there, then as I cook, I don't have time to think about what's different about this mess in a split second when I need to move something, and what ends up happening is that the small mess causes a bigger mess and more work. Whereas if I clean up whatever it is right away, the kitchen is ready for whatever might come up, everything is where it needs to be if I need something immediately. It's a tool thats ready to go. Rather than mess-ups cascading on each other, I can save something in an instant.

But enough about saving things. It always has to happen, but we strive to read the recipe beforehand and know what's coming and what to expect. So dishes.

Now there's a professor down the hall from me who studies Eastern Philosophy --- I teach math. I asked him once why it's important to teach math to students. He said the only thing that matters, for example when a student is doing a calculus problem, is the moment when the student is absorbed in the math, when they are living math for a minute or for half an hour. In that half-hour, their mind is in a single state. There's no stress, there's no worries, there's flow. It's a rare thing and a pleasurable thing.

When I do dishes, there's a flow. It doesn't have to be a new, fascinating dish, a new ingredient, an amazing novel, a great movie, a beautiful piece of music. Now when I started doing dishes, it was cumbersome, messy. It took a few weeks before I did dishes without thinking about this new cumbersome chore. Now I just do them. It's part of my life.

Overall, I think cooking and doing dishes is faster than going out. I cook better than stuff I can afford to buy (I had an awful hotdog recently.) And it's not unpleasant once I started doing it regularly.