Asking yourself, What am I doing? will help you overcome the habit of wanting to complete things quickly

Recently, I’ve been trying to do the dishes in silence. The easiest way to get them done, of course, is to blast some music, or put a podcast into my ears, to separate my mind from my body and distract myself from the task at hand. This will always be the post-dinner-party strategy, the only way to get it done. But in an effort to repair my relationship with time and attention and wean myself off of the devices that drain me, I have been trying to become more comfortable alone in my own head. Some people call dish-washing meditative; I don’t think I’ll ever get there. I am a subsistence dish-washer, not a fanatic. The act does not bring me delight, but I know that abstaining from it will only bring me stress. So I do it, and quietly. Sometimes I’ll even ask myself those words from Miller’s epigraph: what am I doing? The question feels like pause, not doubt.

Sometimes when I don’t feel like doing the dishes, I’ll set a timer for 8 minutes, and tell myself that when it goes off, I can stop. But I never do. I’m either done or I keep going, it always works.

Cleaning, that is: before refrigeration was commonplace, cleaning after cooking meant keeping your family safe.

The end point of cooking is not eating; it is cleaning.We dream, we plan, we crave, we shop, we chop, we fry, we simmer, we garnish, we serve. And then we eat, sometimes alone and sometimes not, and when the eating is done, a mess remains, record of our pleasure.