I needed to clear my head earlier, and the first thing that came to mind was doing the dishes. The process of how I came to that conclusion is what intrigues me: What is the connection between doing some mundane chore, and the organisation of ones thoughts?

Gently put, I was focusing on a solution for one of life's little involuntary diaphragmatic spasms. Hiccups are a nuisance to anybody's breathing rhythm, the dishes were merely an elaborate scare tactic to ward off the setback. If meditating is a practice of focussing one's mind, with either chanting or in silence, then that is what I was doing.

The tones that were emanating from the kitchen sink were a charming concoction of clangs, pings and over-flowing perennial waters. A chant of sort to calm a bellowing mind. The repetition of scrubbing and neatly placing clean crockery to dry was a soothing hypnotic overture. Like how playing a song repeatedly gives one focus on whatever task they're charged with.

But meditation, like hypnosis, is useless if it is without purpose. Purpose is far too broad a topic to be challenged from just routinely washing the dishes, but it can be broken down — like syllables — to find smaller solutions to a larger problem. The problem that plagued me does not matter, what matters is that I found a tiny amount of satori through an ordinary task. The dishes were a soft-spoken mediator to a Zen moment. Eureka! I found a solution, and that pleases me so.

The connection between a dull task and organising thought, is that there is no connection. Allow me to explain. A messy sink is not the problem; the task I was doing has nothing to do with my predicament . If anything, a cluttered sink is a metaphor for an uneasy mind, visualised. It is through the hypnotic repetition of cleaning that allowed me to briefly cleanse my mind. I was using one problem to fix the next, like Simultaneous Equations.

Let me clarify it even further. Its like venting out some pent-up frustration on somebody who has nothing to do with the source of your anger. After letting it all out on your unfortunate victim, you'd feel a little better.

Undoubtably, we've all had these "uh-huh" moments, and they vary in exclamation; but a small dose of medication is better than none at all.

It would be unscientific of me to not try and repeat the process of how I got to that moment of clarity. The process and the moment matter, and for a brief moment, nothing else does. Clarity.