Meditations on a Toilet
Yup. The toilet. That’s what I’m writing about today. Cleaning the toilet. Specifically, I’m writing about cleaning the toilet every day.
For years, I’ve kept a work journal. I got this idea from Madeline Stilley’s article on Levo League and I’ve also written about it here on the blog on the blog before. I have found this habit to be transformative and so, even now, as I’ve undergone a temporary transformation from full-time professor to full-time PhD student (but not for much longer!!!), I’ve kept up the habit of the work journal. I think we are constantly developing, and part of that development—for many people—is pondering their life’s work. That work might be paid, unpaid, volunteer, part-time, full-time, or some combination of all of the above. Throughout changes and developments, my work journal continues to allow me to reflect on what I’m doing, what I’m accomplishing, where I’m headed, and what might be the next best step.
This is all a long wind-up to say that, this week, I ended up writing about cleaning the toilet in my work journal. Cleaning the toilet is, after all, work. It’s the thankless, inglorious work that someone has to do. But I recently became interested in the practice of cleaning the toilet every day because of a video that I watched on the youtube channel Samurai Matcha. Aki, the host, shared that he cleans his toilet every day, a practice that he adopted from a Japanese business guru who continued to clean the toilet in his offices every day, even after he was an extremely wealthy man. The practice, he believed, continued to reinforce humility. According to feng shui, it also tended to an area associated with money. Don’t we often talk about money “going down the drain”?
I started doing it. I’ve cleaned my toilet every day for the past two weeks. Who knows how long I’ll keep up this habit, but so far, I’m kind of a convert. Why? Do I have obsessive compulsive disorder? Well, maybe a little (I am pretty neat!). But, cleaning the toilet every day is a weirdly meditative practice. It is sort of humbling, but in kind of a good way. I have to physically crouch down to get all the hard-to-reach spots which, actually, is teaching me to preserve my back (if you are a parent, you know that you reach down to the floor to pick up a toy, a sock…a something…about a thousand times a day—it’s backicide). Sometimes, I feel like I’m looking the toilet base in the eye, and we are regarding each other. It’s a mindless task, in an oddly satisfying way.
You’d think you’d rush through an unpleasant task like this one, but I find the opposite. I do it kind of slowly. The toilet is really still so clean from the day before that the task isn’t really gross. I feel like I’m polishing the toilet more than cleaning it. I think about my life, I think about my money, I think about my family, I think about my career, and I fix one small thing in my life. Here’s what I wrote in my work journal…
Turns out it’s pretty tough to take an artful picture of a toilet…but here’s my best shot. Can you feel the cleanliness?!?!
“Cleaning the toilet every day…I feel a little strange about it, like maybe it’s really OCD but at the same time, it’s pretty soothing. I kind of take my time and think about being humble and slow. And I really like how nice and clean our bathroom is. Like, somehow, anyone could come over at any time and because the bathroom is clean, I’m not really stressed. The bathroom is also our dirtiest room (other than maybe the kids’ rooms). But the bathroom is like DIRTY. When I’m in there cleaning the toilet, I see other little spots. Each day I do a little bit…the grouting on this bit of floor, the edge of this tile, this yucky corner, and slowly but surely, the bathroom becomes a nicer place. It's a testament to the great power of the infinitesimal, which has been my experience of parenthood—small steps, small chunks of time, is the only way to get big things done. Kind of a paradox. Plus, even though it’s pseudoscience, I think about how cleaning the toielt is helping my money feng shui. Maybe simply by thinking about finances and financial wellbeing each day, it turns the mind to this as a priority. I start to think about the ways money is flowing down the drain, mindlessly, and I begin to consider the ways I might stop it from doing so. I think about how I might start a business or market myself in a job search. Maybe it’s just about attention.”
Who knew that cleaning the toilet could provoke such deep thoughts?
Cleaning the toilet, like so many tasks of motherhood and adulthood, lacks glory, lacks recompense—at least in a monetary way—but it is still necessary work. This week I took the last exam of my last class of my PhD program (and defended my preliminary exams the week before…so officially ABD now!). There’s the high—the intellectual, the impressive—and then there’s the low—the dishes, the dinner, the toilet, the diapers that need changing, the dog who needs a walk. All of them matter, even if none of them are recorded in history. This is the work that we all do. I am lifting it up, as though on a white porcelain pedestal.
ps- Check out the OG toilet art, Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” at the Tate Modern here.
