Spilled Coffee

This morning my husband spilled a very large, very full cup of coffee all over my kitchen.  I’m always surprised at the distance and reach that flailing liquid can achieve.  It seemed as though the full contents of the cup had splattered all around me. But upon closer inspection I realized the majority of the coffee had emptied right into the closed drawer below.  (Those who understand physics better than my high school education might explain this to me but I digress.)  The dreaded utensil drawer, with all of its random spatulas, measuring cups, tongs and more were swimming in brown liquid.  I had nowhere to be so I offered to clean it up as the hubs was in a hurry to get to work.  

It quickly occurred to me that a large percentage of the items existing in that drawer were things I never used.  Or the items I did use existed in unnecessary multiples, some preferable to others. In some cases I didn’t even know what the tool was and why did I think I ever needed it.  Needless to say, after staring at the freshly wiped out drawer I realized I had a clean slate to work with.  I was under no obligation to put every object back into it.  I picked up each item and intentionally chose what role it played in my life and in my utensil drawer.

This may sound like an everyday boring Monday (at least I think it’s Monday?) morning to most but it is a concept that has absolutely been on my mind consistently over the past couple of months.  Just like that unwelcome and unexpected spilling of the coffee, COVID-19 came into our lives. With surprising reach it splattered into places we never foresaw and has dumped its muddy water into the kitchen drawer of our lives.  Certainly it will take lots of time and tools to clean up such a mess.  Unfortunately, we have no idea how long that will take but I’m convinced our kitchen drawers will never look the same.  And I can’t help being drawn to the idea that, as we adapt and creep slowly into the new normal, we have been given the rare opportunity to decide exactly what we want to put back into that drawer of our lives.

The Chinese use two characters to write the word “crisis”. One stands for danger; the other for opportunity. We are most certainly in a global crisis. I have felt the danger.  We all have.  But as the Chinese understand and the ancient Roman stoics taught -- with obstacles come opportunity. 

Historically, change and innovations have developed out of times of crisis:  

-The game Monopoly was invented in 1935 after Charles Darrow decided to give people something to be entertained with after all the sadness of the Great Depression.

-The U.S. Army installed the first operational two-way radios in planes during the Great War, essentially the beginning of air traffic control. 

-During the First World War, French nurses figured out that clean, absorbent cellulose bandages were far superior to any predecessors and the modern sanitary napkin as we know it was made possible.

-During WWII the Allies developed synthetic rubber when the Axis powers controlled much of the natural rubber in the South Pacific. 

-My favorite bourbon made by a company in Washington has turned to manufacturing hand sanitizer for those in need during COVID.

Surely there will be other inventions and innovations that will come out of this current crisis. But in bad times, innovation can occur in habits of mind as well as in new technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic is hopefully creating such a change now—by forcing us to slow down and get away from the noise and heave of the world. We are able to spend more time in personal reflection and stillness. We have an opportunity to think about who we are, as individuals and as a society.

My kitchen drawer did not overflow with miscellaneous crap overnight.  It slowly grew with the mindlessness and routines of daily life.  The same goes for the habits of mind and lifestyle we become accustomed to.  The idea of “being busy” and rushing around in life has become a badge of honor that most of us wear with pride.  At the very least we wear it out of obligation to not appear as a lazy slacker taking up oxygen better utilized by those who are “getting shit done”.  Without noticing we’ve decided our value is measured by things such as our physical appearance. We fill our days buying creams, getting our nails done, our hair colored, buy new things to wear and even inject poison into our faces.  We slowly slip into the routines our ego desires chasing individual success, status, money, popularity, or achievement. Our slowly conditioned habits of mind have told us this is what makes us valuable and bring us worth and meaning.

But habits of mind and lifestyle do not change easily.  Like my husband's giant hand swinging towards the coffee cup, a powerful force of some kind must strike to awaken us.  Well, it appears we have been struck. The global pandemic has given us a chance to stop and notice: We have been living too fast. We have unwittingly sold ourselves to the villains of efficiency, hyper-connectivity, speed, money and “progress.”

More than ever we are making a decision every moment of every day how we are going to spend our time.  We are deciding what to pay attention to and where we will direct our energy.  The things we value are constantly reflected in the way we choose to behave.  As the author Mark Manson says, “Values are won and lost through life experience. Not through logic or feelings or even beliefs. They have to be lived and experienced to stick.”  We have been given an opportunity now to do just that.  Over the past few weeks I’ve written down some of the essential values I hold dear.  And with each I’ve then asked myself the question “Do the things I think or say or do in life reflect that value?”  It’s been an uncomfortable reckoning and one that will take courage to modify moving forward.  Because to go out and live my life in some ways that appear contradictory to my old one is pretty scary.  

We will have the chance to ponder on these things into the foreseeable future as this virus hasn’t yet magically disappeared.  But I’m hoping that this tending to the inner self is not a one time event.  Instead it can be an ongoing part of a life lived deliberately, requiring an enduring change of lifestyle and habits.  The virus will pass, at some point.  Or at least it will fade into the cloud of other viruses and disease.  There will be suffering and death and economic devastation.  These losses are an enormous tragedy that we cannot overemphasize.  Our world is broken and it will take years to rebuild.  

But maybe this slower paced life during these months can help us decide which proverbial utensils we will be putting back into the kitchen drawer of our lives.  And perhaps this introspective, intentional way of living can help us put the pieces of this broken world back together.  And maybe, just maybe, this new way of living can become permanent.  

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Henry David Thoreau