Letter of Recommendation: Washing Dishes →

June 13, 2019 Bethany Spiller

By Mike Powell

June 4, 2019 

 I’ve often said that the best job I ever had was washing dishes at a small Italian restaurant just after college. I say I washed dishes. I also bussed tables and prepped food and, at the end of the night, would blow into the state-mandated breathalyzer on the owner’s car so he could drive home drunk.

It wasn’t the easiest place to work. The owner was mercurial, the atmosphere disorganized. But no matter what else happened during a given shift, I’d find myself in the back room washing dishes. We had one of those commercial units, a giant silver box whose hood raised and lowered with the whisk of a magician’s hat. Pull the lever on a pile of dirty dishes and — voilà — a pile of clean dishes would emerge from a cloud of steam.

As much as I liked the machine, I often took the time to do the job by hand. It became a welcome ritual, a ballast against the chaos of the everyday. And like any worthwhile practice — marriage, creativity, compassion — it engendered the kind of patience that lets you see how life is something to be managed, not conquered. You might finish a load, but you’ll almost always have another one coming.

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to buy a dishwasher of our own. As parents (we had a 1-year-old son and another child on the way), we’d surrendered to convenience, bending witlessly toward any purchase that could give us more time or space. But lately I’ve been wondering what that time and space is for. Implied in the quest for convenience is a distinction between the life we deem worth living and the life we have to endure in order to get there. One is a possibility, the other an obligation; one is a means, the other an end. Look at dishwasher ads from the 1950s, when the appliance became commonplace, and you see narratives of a life reclaimed, an escape from the purgatory of work into the freedom of leisure. Life hacks, multitasking, the ruthless compression of our daily routine: We still frame the ordinary as something that exists only for the thing beyond it, as a hazard to be optimized away instead of an organism to be nurtured and interacted with.

It’s not that I begrudge people their phones or their Prime accounts or their housecleaners. If anything, I empathize: The simpler the moment in front of me, the more anxious I become. I could be doing something, I should be doing something. But a life under constant threat of novelty isn’t a life; it’s exhaustion.

Washing dishes by hand, I give myself the chance to remember that this is wrong — that most of life is ordinary; that ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows. Embrace this — the warm water, the pruned hands, the prismatic gleam of the bubbles and the steady passage from dish to dish to dish — and feel, however briefly, the breath of actual time, a reality that lies dormant and plausible under all the clutter we pile on top of it. A bird makes its indecipherable call to another bird, a song from a passing car warps in the Doppler effect and I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that I need a lot less than I think I do and that I don’t have to leave my kitchen to get it.

I’m not advocating the twee harmony of a perfect kitchen, of things being spick-and-span or just so. Dirty dishes mean people have been eating; that people have been eating means bowels will be emptied; that bowels will be emptied means we are not and will never be the sweatless caricatures marketed to us by the wellness industry.

Instead, we will continue to be what we are: people, together, making a mess. An anxious kid, I spent a lot of parties hiding under the table; as an adult, I head to the kitchen, where I can slip the interpersonal glare of conversation while still enjoying the miracle of company I love, of empty stomachs now filled.

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Mike Powell lives in Tucson, Arizona.

A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 2019, on Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times Magazine with the headline: Washing Dishes and online at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-washing-dishes.html?searchResultPosition=1

Connecting Intuitive Eating and Intuitive Living

November 30, 2016 Bethany Spiller

I often meet clients who tell me that if they could only "get their eating under control," everything would be fine. In essence, their eating behaviors are not seen as connected to any other aspect of their lives. I, on the other hand, see it a bit differently. Here's an article that I wrote for Health&Fitness in June 2014. See what you think...

There are scads of books and articles written about the concept of intuitive eating. In short, it means feeding yourself based on your own experience of your needs and desires rather than what diet plans, friends, or “experts” dictate. Intuitive eating philosophy centers on the idea that your body can be a trustworthy and consistent source of wisdom about your health and well being. This concept, however simple as it sounds, is not very easy to sell, and certainly is not easy to implement. In my experience as an eating disorder specialist, many people do not eat intuitively much less live that way. To many, such a prescription for health sounds like mayhem in the making! But if we don’t know what is best for ourselves, then to whom are we listening?

If someone is struggling with disordered eating, whether it be compulsive dieting or a full-blown eating disorder, she or he is always overriding their own intuitions and "swallowing" other sources of information, whether they "taste" good to them or not. This is quite a normative occurrence in our culture. That’s not to say that seeking wise counsel or staying informed of empirical science should be excluded. It’s "swallowing it whole" that’s the problem rather than simply "chewing on it" to see if it’s for us or not. For example, many women totally discount their own experience of hunger and fullness. They lose the ability to know what they want to eat, what would taste good, and how much is enough. They substitute their authentic needs and desires for what they believe they should want or need. And where do those directives come from? They come from anywhere but from within – magazines, peers, media, parents, and the culture at large. Over time, people become numb to their bodily cues and intuitions, resulting in their inability to care for themselves at the most basic level. In time, many people end up at unhealthy weights, unable to eat or stop eating, and chronically dissatisfied with themselves. There is always backlash for ignoring the self.

On a broader level, it is my opinion that most folks carry this strategy to living their lives in general. Living intuitively is replaced by living robotically, leading to feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction. We follow plans and flow charts designed to bring us meaning and fulfillment. We look to culturally held values for answers, rather than using these resources to inform our own intrinsic natures. Just like it is difficult for a women with disordered eating to embrace an indulgent craving, it is difficult for someone to bless their true desire to change jobs, change relationships, dislike what other may like, or like what others don’t. Living intuitively means seeking what is right for your rather than believing in the one right answer. It is my experience that as people begin to trust themselves and look inward for direction they become more aware of what they are truly craving from life and are then better able to feed themselves in nourishing and meaningful ways.