Folding the Laundry

Laundry is my favorite muse.

Sorting clean things, folding and stacking, it's so easy to park in my comfort zone and slip right into neutral. My gears shift down and I idle, thoughts thrumming through my fingers into socks and underwear, folded likewise into new ideas, stacked for later reference. They sigh with relief at their freedom from my internal dew loop, grateful for attention, and I touch the napkins with a smile.

I never hurry through the folding. It is a chore that must be done, and so I am justified in spending the time, deliciously turning it to my own purpose. When my kids were young and I needed to keep tabs, had to share the time, I turned on TV and at least emptied my head. Now, without distractions, I can free-associate or focus as I wish, the time all mine.

The laundry muse is particularly useful for setting priorities, sifting tasks through the sieve of my feelings. The most important thing is not always the most efficient thing (in my usual functional appraisal), so in laundry musing my tasks and ideas are always weighted by their pleasure potentials. Of course, this means that when the laundry is put away, I go after the things that I like the best. I have found (rather counterintuitively) that this is good policy in general, because when procrastinating the awful things, they often just fall off the list altogether.  Like putting off cleaning the garbage can and suddenly the City brings you a new one - what a waste if you had bothered to clean out the old one when you should have! I call this my Pursue-the-Smile production policy.

Alternatively, the laundry muse is also good for a full-focus review of whatever plans I am considering. Creative projects particularly benefit from the desire for order that results from my working hands. At the same time, the relaxed flow of thoughts releases my imagination, and during a laundry muse I am markedly better at visualizing and understanding details and outcomes. As a result I feel more in control and better prepared to undertake the good ideas, while hundreds of others have met their demise at the hands of such aha moments. Deservedly. I am hardly every without a new project and they can't all be winners.