I had just returned from a Sunday spiritual retreat—a day steeped in meditation, mindfulness, and the kind of profound silence that makes you feel as though you’re floating six inches off the ground. By the time I arrived home, my calm was absolute. I was in an enlightened, Zen-like state, a "dispassionate witness" to the world.
Mack greeted me, though with notably less joyful abandon than usual. This was in the era before Liza, and I’d been forced to leave him with my housemate, Craig—a man with whom Mack didn’t exactly "gel."
Still wrapped in my blanket of peace, I remembered the laundry I’d left in the machine before the retreat. I went to retrieve it, carried it upstairs, and meticulously hung it on the clothes horse on my balcony. It was only then that a distinctly non-spiritual aroma began to pierce my meditative bubble.
I looked down. My shoes were covered. I looked at the floor. My bedroom was a minefield. The stairs, the lounge, the kitchen—it was everywhere.
The source, I realized, was the laundry room. Mack, perhaps voicing his profound displeasure at being left behind, had made a significant "deposit" right in front of the machine. In my enlightened haze, I had walked straight through it and proceeded to stamp my new, smelly reality into every square inch of the house.
"Shit!" I said—a mantra somewhat different from the ones I’d practiced that morning.
My school of meditation was all about "The Witness." Observe the breath. Observe the sensation. Do not react. So, as I spent the next hour and a half on my hands and knees with a mop and a bucket, I repeated my new focus: "Witness and don’t react."
It was the ultimate spiritual practice. I stood over the bucket, a dispassionate observer of the Pine O'Cleen, trying to remain grounded while the physical evidence of Mack’s indignation met my scrubbing brush.
I can’t say I passed the test with flying colors—there may have been some un-Zen-like muttering under my breath—but I was certainly less agitated than I would have been without the retreat. Mack had taught me a valuable lesson: enlightenment is all well and good, but in the real world, you still have to watch where you step.
