Science is a glorious endeavor, but most of my journeys into that realm of wonder begin in the same place: washing dishes. Now, I could go off into a rant right here about the fact that I’m having to wash someone else’s dishes, and how messy the lab can be at times, especially when people spill powders and don’t clean them up, or leave mortars and pestles laying about, covered in powder, with bits of weighing paper and measuring boats casually strewn about, unlabeled solutions, puddles of mysterious goo, books, trash, spatulas, broken glass, and other random things, all cluttering the work bench, but I’m not going to do that here, one, because that type of rant has no place in this article, and two, because I fear it would lead to one really long run-on sentence, and I, for one, am a big fan of grammatically correct writing, even if I sometimes don’t actually engage in the practice. So I’m not going to talk about having to clean up after other grad students, instead, I’m just going to blame it on the occasional undergrad that passes through and get back to the point.
Most of my journeys into the scientific realm of wonder begin in the same place: washing dishes. So, when I found myself once again standing at the sink cleaning beakers to run a set of reactions, I was not at all surprised. If you’ve washed dishes before, you know that sometimes it can be quite a chore. Things get baked into a dish, the dish gets set aside for a few days, and whatever bit of food you had has mysteriously turned into some kind of super-substance that seems to be stronger than steel. You scrub and scrub at it, soak it in soapy water, break out the baking soda, the vinegar, the sander, a drill, and finally, finally! those bits of food start to come loose. The wife comes in and rolls her eyes and you’re like, “What? I’m doing the dishes?!”
It’s like that in the lab sometimes except multiplied by a factor of about 100. Crazy sticky compounds get baked into the glassware at crazy sticky temperatures. Sticky temperatures? Yeah. Because when you’re dealing with the temperatures we deal with, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ just aren’t descriptive enough. And so, after the undergrad takes his sample out of the beaker or crucible or whatever, they set that beaker or crucible by the sink, and that’s where I go the next day to start my experiment.
So there I am, scrubbing and scrubbing on a beaker but there’s one spot that won’t come off. I break out the acetone, the MEK, the high-grit sand paper, but nothing seems to have any effect. Luckily, as I’m standing there debating whether or not I should try some fuming nitric acid, I happen to notice that this particular spot is actually on the outside of the beaker. I’ve just spent the last ten minutes scrubbing the inside of this beaker (the glass is now thin in a few places), and all the while, the spot was on the outside. I look around to make sure nobody had seen this whole spectacle transpire, and resume my work like nothing had happened.
On the spiritual path we are very concerned with the inner world. We are interested in inner process like purification and transformation and meditation and contemplation, and we know that “what’s on the inside counts,” so cleaning the inside is both practical and necessary. In the lab, contamination can have disastrous results on an experiment, while what’s on the outside of your reaction vessel is unimportant. Nonetheless, when it’s there, that spot on the outside is all we can see. A dirty kitchen, a messy bedroom, a looming deadline, an unfinished task – have you ever tried to meditate when all these things are present? It’s difficult. So sometimes getting our outer world in order is the most spiritual thing we can do. It completes those nagging things in our minds so that we can be free of them and get back to what matters. Once the outer world is taken care of, and the distractions are gone, we are finally able to focus, to gaze into the soul and see clearly what’s there.
Life is messy, and there are things that just need to be done. Monks locked away in their monasteries still have their chores, and they do them because it’s necessary, it’s a part of life.
We know that the world is full of distractions, so wash the dishes, feed the dog, take a shower. Let’s take care of the outer world, free ourselves, and continue the journey within.