the art of washing dishes

The art of washing dishes is that you only have to wash one at a time. If you're doing it day after day, you have in your mind's eye an enormous stack of filthy dishes that you have washed up in years past and an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you will wash up in years future. But if you bring in your mind to the state of reality which just is - as I pointed out to you - only Now.
This is where we are.
There is only Now.
You only have to wash one dish!
It's the only dish you will ever have to wash!
This one!
You ignore all the rest.
Because in reality there is no past and there is no future.
There is just now. So you wash this one.

And instead of thinking, have I got it really clean as my mother taught me with an angry voice, that I have to get every little scrap off it and she got hhh, got angry at you.
Instead, you turn the cleaning movement into a dance... like this.

And you did that. And you swing that plate around, you let the rinsing water go over it and you put it off to the rack. Crazy you see!
Take the next one.
You get this rhythm going on. You see?
And you're not under compulsion all the time.

- Alan Watts, Work as Play