Doing dishes...

Washing the dirty vessels in the kitchen sink is something I used to despise when I was younger. I was around 15 years old when I was first made to do dishes- I absolutely hated it !! That was before the invention of liquid dish wash, and I had to make do with the bar. It was a dull green, slimy and smelly. YUCK!! As a kid I never had imagined that one day I would actually have to wash dirty vessels. But life has a way of making you do things you would have never done by choice. And this is how important lessons in life are learnt- not by choice, but because there is no other way. Gradually, I resigned to my fate and realized that it was not such a bad job after all. In fact, many spiritual thoughts came to me while I was engaged in this unpleasant activity. Cleaning a sink full of vessels was very much like facing certain life situations. Initially a problem may seem insurmountable to you, but if you think about it calmly, you would definitely find a way out. The way to tackle problems when you find yourself surrounded by them is to tackle them one by one. This is how I did the vessels, one at a time. First I would scrub all the plates, then the tea cups followed by spoons and ladles. This would clear up half the load.Now I would be left with the huge cookers and kadhai. In a few minutes, they would also be done. And there!! The sink would be cleared!! It would take just around 30 minutes. But before you could move away from there, someone would start dropping in more dirty dishes to wash- used spoons, greasy plates and all. Ah!! So much like life. When you think you are just done with facing a challenge, you find yourself surrounded by new ones. Still, life goes on, as more dishes pile up in the sink for cleaning.