It is embarrassing to admit that even after forty years of trying to practice without “gaining ideas,” I still catch myself believing that the real practice is happening somewhere else—on a cushion, in a cave, anywhere but here, standing at the sink with a pile of dishes and one small black pot with a layer of oatmeal welded to the bottom.

Soaking it did no good.

I scraped at it with a wooden spoon, then with the edge of a sponge, becoming a little more irritated than I thought I would get.

All I really know this morning is the kitchen, with its three pots, a cutting board that still needs attention, and a mind that keeps up a low protest the way the refrigerator hums in the background: This is not what I should be doing right now.

As though my real life were waiting for me to finish the dishes.

Eventually I stopped listening to the peanut gallery of my mind. I put both hands into the warm, soapy water and began. Funny how often the very thing we’ve been resisting is that old invitation: “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

It wasn’t the sink I had been avoiding.

It was the story I had been telling myself about the sink.

The oatmeal didn’t magically soften. It still took another few minutes of scraping. The cutting board still needed washing. There was no choir of angels. No cosmic marimba band.

Still, something had shifted.

I wouldn’t say I was enjoying myself. But I was no longer wishing I were somewhere else.

Perhaps this is the practice: seeing the same restless mind at work everywhere—complaining about oatmeal welded to the bottom of a small black pot, growing impatient in the checkout line, replaying old conversations while brushing its teeth.

Then simply coming back to what is here: this ordinary morning, these hands in warm, soapy water.