I stretch out in bed, breathing, feeling the summer sunlight and the breeze on my face. I want to stay here and rest some more. I don’t want to get up, get in the shower, and fall into the routine of the day. It feels like work and I’d rather savor this beautiful, blessed rest.
At some point, I realize that my feet have hit the floor in spite of me. Some dutiful automatic pilot has taken over and I seem to be starting my day.
I adjust the water for my shower and begin the first task of the day. Warm water washes over me. I close my eyes and I’m in my own private waterfall. When was the modern shower invented? When did people begin to experience this “task”. Why would I think of it as a job to do? It can cool me in the summer and warm me in the winter.
It cleanses me and gives me a private place where my thoughts can run free. The shower can be meditative. More often for me, everything that needs to be washed away comes forward to be cleansed. It’s not just about the soil and sweat that my body has picked up. It’s also about the things that are dirtying my mind and heart. I’m alone and the activity at hand doesn’t require much mental focus. The thoughts that I’ve been pushing into the background find their way into my consciousness. I begin to embrace the anger, the frustration and the depression. The shower is a good place to cry. The cleansing tears blend with the cleansing water streaming down my face. The sound of rushing water masks the sound of my crying from anyone who might hear me from outside the room. I can be so distracted that I know that I’ve lathered and rinsed my hair, but can’t for the life of me remember whether or not I’ve repeated.
I think back on the greatest shower of my life. I had gone out to dinner with a friend and planned to go to a play. When I arrived at the theater, I got the news that my son had broken his arm. I rushed to the hospital wearing a dress that was appropriate for dinner and the theater, but would not have been my choice for spending two nights sleeping on a pull out bed in a hospital room without going home to change clothes or clean up. After those two nights and two surgeries, a nurse leaned into the room and beckoned to me. She led me down the hallway to a room marked “Private” where she showed me how to use the nurses shower and pressed a clean white bath towel and a sample sized bottle of baby shampoo into my hands. She closed the door and left me alone at last.
It’s common for me to carefully select the right shampoo for my hair and to choose shower gels with my favorite scents, but I don’t know if anything has ever felt as satisfying as using that little bottle of baby shampoo to wash myself from hair to toe. All of the fear and anxiety about my son’s injury: nerve damage, anesthesia and the countless other things that could go wrong washed away. I was clean. When I returned to my son’s room he and my husband were watching a movie and we could get ready to go home in a few hours.
How many millennia did humankind exist without this? How many people on the planet today would be amazed at the incredible luxury of that customized cleansing waterfall? How many people spend a large part of their day carrying muddy, bacteria-laden water for their families to drink, just so they can survive while I take this privilege for granted,