The Miracle of Water Mindfulness

One summer in college, I lived with my godparents in North Carolina while doing an internship. Perched over their sink one humid summer night washing dishes after a spaghetti dinner, I discovered that even dishwashing methods could be controversial. My godmother watched me fill a small bowl with potently soapy water and use it as a basin from which to wash other dishes. When I told her this was the way my mother had taught me to wash the dishes, she seemed aghast, and told me I should fill the entire sink with soapy water. But my mother, raised with wells on a water-hungry rice farm in rural South Korea, didn’t grow up with an endless supply of clean water — this was how she washed dishes.

Water is expensive and precious in Asia, where a wetroom shower is common, in which you don special rubber bathroom slippers, sit on a plastic stool and use predetermined basins of water — ofttimes one clean large supply bowl, and one smaller work bowl for rinsing or mixing or dunking the shampooed head. Sometimes there is a large hand scoop that you can use to dip into your work bowl’s water, so that you can rinse your head with cupfuls of the hand scoop. Either way, you use much less water than a conventional American shower, and you’re really aware of how much you’re using, because you can see how much of the basin water is left. An American friend called this method “crazy.” Is it crazy, or are we in the West crazy, believing that we have infinite supplies of clean water?

Throughout my travels across Asia, the West Indies and Mexico, I’ve been struck at how much more expensive and precious water is. In homestays in Cuba, water often seemed to come through filtration systems that emptied into large jugs, and the supply was far from infinite — when we ran out, we had to wait for more filtration to happen, and it seemed to slow to a trickle. I had many cold showers across Southeast Asia, Cuba and Mexico because heating water is expensive and boilers weren’t everywhere. I frequently notice during travels how much less water I drink because drinking clean bottled water requires frequent trips to the store. In Mexico or Vietnam, getting a friend a bottle of water was somehow a larger token of love than it was in the States. As the Lakota say, Mni Wiconi. Water is life. When my friend got me a bottle of water, she was handing me nothing less than a desire that I live.

The way we Americans use our water is far from the gold standard around the world. We use 159 gallons a day to the world’s average 25 gallons a day, and we use twice as much as we think we do. “By 2050 a third of the people on Earth may lack a clean, secure source of water,” National Geographic’s Freshwater Initiative wrote. Water is what makes our food possible and delicious, in so many ways. Where would pasta be without potable water, or tofu? What about meat, and vegetables? What would honeybees be without water to sip? What would our bodies be, without the honeybees to keep nature in balance, or without that clean, hydrating sip of water after a hard workout? All of it depends upon water.

Water is already more precious than gold, when you think about it. Gold doesn’t keep your cells, organs and tissues afloat, and it can’t sustain your body. The UN has warned that “the planet will face a 40 per cent shortfall in water supply in 2030 unless the international community ‘dramatically’ improves water supply management” and that “demand for water is slated to skyrocket 55 per cent by 2050 while 20 per cent of global groundwater is already overexploited.” If we are to preempt a Mad Max-like era of worshipping water and belonging to those who own it, we need to use our most important resource much more mindfully and work to change water policy around the world. Here are a few easy tips on reducing water usage.

I washed my dishes environmentally because it was what my mother taught me. But Thich Nhat Hanh, affectionately known as Thay, or teacher, was the first person who ever made me think about the actual act of washing the dishes — beyond a quick cleanup after a bellyful of food, that is. A friend had loaned me the Vietnamese Buddhist monk’s book The Miracle of Mindfulness, and my life was changed forever. Like kinh hanh, or walking meditation, washing the dishes could be a meditative process, wherein I considered the dishes, how they were made, my muscles, the temperature of the water, and the bubbles. Sometimes, my thoughts would zoom out to environmental water usage, the person who made these dishes, or even my consciousness, but not always. But more and more, my mind wasn’t on the past or the future.

“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes,’” Thay wrote. “What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”