Thich Nhat Hanh and the Art of Washing Dishes

In his 1975 book The Miracle of Mindfulness, the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about washing dishes. Not as a chore to get through before meditating. As the meditation itself.

He described two ways of washing dishes. The first: washing them in order to have clean dishes. You rush through the task, mind already at the cup of tea waiting for you on the other side. The dishes are a means to an end.

The second: washing each dish as if it were the most important thing in the world. Feeling the warm water. Noticing the weight of each plate. Being, fully, a person washing a dish.

“While washing the dishes,” he wrote, “one should only be washing the dishes.” If you cannot be present for this, he asked, how will you be present for anything?

The radical implication

What Thich Nhat Hanh was suggesting is quietly revolutionary: there is no separate category of life called “meditation time,” partitioned off from the mundane. Every moment is eligible.

The commute. The shower. The folding of laundry. The making of coffee. All of these are opportunities to either be fully present or to be somewhere else in your head.

Most of us spend most of our lives somewhere else.

Informal practice

Formal meditation — sitting, timer, breath — is valuable. But Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight is that formal practice alone is insufficient. If mindfulness only exists on the cushion, it hasn’t really taken root.

The informal practice is everything in between. Pick one daily task — any task — and commit to doing it with full attention, just once, today. Not forever. Just today.

Notice what that’s like.

He died in 2022 at the age of ninety-five, having spent decades teaching that peace is available in any moment, to anyone, regardless of circumstance. The miracle he kept pointing to wasn’t remote or mystical.

It was the warm water. The dish in your hands. This moment, right here.