Wood Bow Tie o’ the Day brings us back to the realm of routine days without celebratory hoopla. The Christmas break is officially over. If the neckwear says it’s over, it’s over.
As I was putting the holiday ties into their storage boxes last night– where they will hibernate until November– I found myself in a sort of meditative state. As I curled each one into another and laid them in the bin, I felt Zen-y. I was so into the regular procedure, I lost myself in peacefulness. It was weird.
Of course, I only knew this weird thing had happened when I came back to myself. When I awoke from my nap of the mind, I was astonished about how the calm that came into in my crazy head was all because I was carefully laying ties into their hibernation. It’s a yearly routine, and it requires touching each tie and making the exact same movements to place it in its box, over 200 times. There is a rhythm to it. It doesn’t require thinking. It requires simply being.
It got me cogitating about how people lose themselves, for example, in gardening. The planting, the pruning, and etc. need to be done over and over and over. There’s a routine and a rhythm in working in a garden, and it can be relaxing.
Routine household chores can be like that. They are work, but they can be calming. Doing them can make you Zen-y. You can get in a zone that makes you let go of all the crap you need to let go of. (Of course, household chores are not as elegant as gardening.) We perform a zillion other routines that cause the same peaceful effect. Hobbies, especially, can do that. Religious rituals can function like that.
But there is a negative effect that can come of the regular, the routine, the same-old-same-old. The negative is that we can fall from peaceful dreaminess too far into only ourselves. That kind of thing can make us forget we are here to care about others. We can also get tunnel vision and forget to discover the unfound and to try new things. We can forget there are things out there that we haven’t yet imagined. You can’t feel joy if you’ve lost your imagination.
BTW I’m putting away the holiday bow ties this evening. If I get as Zen-y about it as I did with the neckties. I’ll let you know.