Putting Off Taking a Shower

I like taking showers. Sometimes very hot showers. Sometimes cold showers, that make me gasp and blow and remind me forcibly that I am alive. Sometimes showers are luxurious and sometimes they're brisk; sometimes I sing and other times I laugh at my own terribly clever jokes; at dire times of my life, the privacy afforded by streaming water was the only privacy I had, and I've been grateful to it ever since.

So it is particularly ludicrous that one of the things I have to force myself to do is -- take a shower. It's an expenditure of oomph, and oomph is a commodity I've always been a little short on. But I will put off taking a shower for hours, or even days, as if I dreaded them.

What is that thing? That resistance? In Iain McGilchrist's terms -- which are the most meaningful I've encountered for understanding this sort of thing -- it's the usurpation of the left brain. I'm engaged in something the left brain has control of: scrolling in Facebook, or solving a Rubik's cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the left brain is stubbornly clinging to power, like an elderly blowhard senator, well into his dotage, who absolutely will not yield the floor. Embarrassing for all concerned, and no good to man or beast, but by God it's got motor control and it intends to keep it.

And that affliction, of the left brain refusing to yield, is what mindfulness meditation addresses, and which for me very little else ever does. Sitting shamatha is -- especially in the early phases of a sit, when meditation is, as a newbie would view it, "not working" -- a hissing and spitting cat fight. The left brain makes bid after bid at seizing motor control, and the right brain does nothing more complicated than saying "No. You have to wait." Tantrum after tantrum, wheedle after wheedle, ingenious excuse after ingenious excuse. You just practice saying, "No, You have to wait."

The right brain is, actually, and properly, the master. It is in every sense prior. But we are in a culture that has forgotten that: which cultivates, pampers, and indulges the left brain no matter what it's set its heart on. We've forgotten that solving problems is useless -- far worse than useless, positively ruinous -- if the problems are the wrong ones. The one thing the left brain cannot do is step back and say, "is this even the right problem?"