Today, I was speaking with a friend who told me that he had just managed to squeeze in his ironing last night. I’d never thought of him standing before an ironing board with a frilly apron around his middle clutching an iron in one hand and a shirt in the other.
He told me that for three weeks the pile had been mounting and mounting on his sofa, until the seat pads were completely covered and the piles were threatening to teeter over the edge and onto the floor. He was motivated to iron purely because he had run out of clothes to wear.
After work he made time and ironed everything in the pile including his underwear. It took him 5 hours and there were still some items remaining, so he started a new pile on the sofa.
He reeled off a long list of what he had ironed and then with a rueful grin on his face told me that the work T-shirt he was wearing had been one of the items that had gone under the iron yesterday. (He was rueful because it was already incredibly creased. Now either he was watching TV when he was ironing & not paying much attention in his haste to reduce the pile of clothing, or he used a really cold iron). I was seriously impressed that he had prioritised his clothing piles to scoop out and iron 38 T-shirts! I don’t even own that many T-shirts! So the ironing mountain had been reduced.
We were chatting about household chores that needed doing. I experienced a pang of guilt as I rarely get the ironing board out, preferring to dry flat, put the garment on a hanger and hang the creases out in the airing cupboard before folding up and putting in a drawer. Usually only work blouses see the underside of the iron!
My friend was as astounded by my lack of ironing. I was astounded by his dedication to it, but as I thought about our conversation later it struck me that although the piles had mounted up, when he actually started to iron, he experienced joy in the activity.
When we are mindful in our routine activities, such as with ironing, we are usually concentrating on getting rid of the wrinkles and creases in the material. We may use sweet-smelling linen spray that gently wets the material making it more malleable and easier to iron or we may use a steam iron which does the job just as well.
Staying in the present moment, seeing how the iron glides across the material, can be soothing and its where life’s magic happens.
When we feel overwhelmed with all the tasks that need doing and which we haven’t been able to find time for (yet) it is great to find a way to retreat from the matters of the future. To give our minds a chance to switch off the endless chatter, and to spend time doing something necessary, routine, perhaps a little boring, but if we focus on doing the best job that we can in the time we have available, then we too are lifted to the lofty stratosphere of being a Domestic Goddess!
When we start accepting that we need to take a break from the inner chatter of the thoughts in our minds, when those thoughts realise that they are being sidelined there is a temptation to come out of the revelry and start listening again. But when this happens it spoils the moment of staying present, in the only instance of life that we occupy at that precise second.
Being present seems to boil down to either staying in the moment, in a light trance where nothing matters except the very thing that we are engaging with in that split second e.g. ironing, or leaving the pleasurable world of the light trance where we have been engaging with something mundane or routine, & refocusing on the endless chatter of the inner-talk-mind-monkeys who excel in distracting us, stressing us, and inducing anxiety.
When we stay in the present, even for a moment when doing something as mundane as ironing, we create a space where the past and the future naturally fall into place, as the one has been and gone, whilst the other hasn’t yet arrived.
Next time you’re tackling a pile of chores, try stepping into the role of the Domestic Goddess and see where the moment takes you!