I never liked washing the dishes. My parents tried to bribe my brother and me to do them, and not even wash them, just put them into the dishwasher, and I still wasn't good at it. Potential money on the table, and I let the plates stack up anyway. Plates in the sink were a common thing. Plates stacked next to the sink were a common thing.
Here's the part that makes me laugh now: I always rinsed them. I didn't want them to be dirty, so I would take the time to rinse them, but I wouldn't wash them until I had no plates left. I cared enough for the half-gesture, just not the whole thing.
The story I told myself was that washing dishes was taking up my precious time. The truth is, that time was going to sitting on the sofa, watching a show, playing a game. The dishes were stealing time from not actually doing anything. And still I would stand there frustrated, in a hurry, wanting it to be done, done, done.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes about washing the dishes to wash the dishes, not to get them done. When I first came across it, I thought, oh yeah, that's neat, and I did not see myself ever doing it. I think that's how these things work. You're made aware of something, and it seeps in, and one day you start thinking about it, and when you start thinking about it, you start making space to do something about it. The information arrives long before the experience does.
I had to work my way there in stages. I used to walk with loud, shouty music. Then I traded the music for audiobooks, using the time more wisely, or more differently I should say. And now I mostly prefer to just walk. Each stage was a little slower than the last. Patience, it turns out, is also something you practice at a pace you can handle.
Somewhere in there I remembered a Japanese parable about a samurai who was made a janitor as an act of shame. He didn't accept the shame. He simply became the best possible janitor, because the point was never to be a samurai. The point was to live by his code, and he could do that holding a mop.
So I started washing the dishes because I'm the one who dirtied them. Responsibility got me to the sink. And if I'm going to clean them, I should do it well. Which, I want to be honest, is also not quite the point. It's not performative. It's not can you do it the best and the fastest. It's can you just be present while you do it.
That's another stage entirely, finally standing at the sink and realizing I'm no longer in a hurry. I still don't love washing the dishes. It does not fulfill me. But I am content to take the time, to wash them well with warm water, to make them ready to be used again by myself or somebody else. Content, not fulfilled. There's a difference, and the difference is the whole practice.
There is real humor in it too. Standing there thinking, I can't believe I'm cleaning this thing and I don't hate it. It doesn't suck. That small surprise is worth paying attention to, because it becomes a reflection point for everything else I don't want to do. I catch myself going, oh, I don't want to do that, and then I remember: doing the dishes wasn't really so bad.
The dishes are a good anchor precisely because they're an everyday thing. We make dishes dirty every day, so every day offers the same small practice: notice the resistance, stand there anyway, let the hurry drain out. There's a satisfaction in cleaning something well, not because anybody's keeping score, but because the thing deserves to be cleaned well.
The goal is not to clean the dishes. The goal is to be present while cleaning the dishes, and nothing else is required. The work will be done when it's done. And a patience you practice at the sink, every single day, is a patience you get to keep everywhere else.