The Women at the Ashram are Annoying Me
I am a control freak.
Like many people who had had to deal with major events that were completely out of their control while growing up, I feel unsettled when things are not done in a certain way.
Hey, at least I'm not obsessive-compulsive any more. I used to have to have objects arranged in a linear fashion, at 90-degree angles to one another. Everything from furniture to food in the cupboards (with all the labels facing forward please), from rugs to scatter cushions to the pencils on my desk. I wasted enormous amounts of energy on that for years, trying to make my world safe. Getting rid of ornaments and knickknacks, so there would be fewer things to have to position.
"What did you do today, honey?"
"Oh, I can't really say, but I was busy the whole day. Look, everything in the house is straight."
I also spent a lot of time cleaning the invisible dirt. You know, the small fibres that you can't see, but they're there on the carpet and if you don't vacuum them up they get out of control and then you will see them. And that would be bad. Very bad. So you have to clean them off before they get out of control. Oh yes, we had a very clean house. Not much joy, not much being at ease in the world, but we had a clean house.
Post-therapy I find myself much more relaxed, and a little more messy. I prefer organic designs to severe angles and choose meaning over form. The house is somewhere to be rather than something to do. My safety grows from the inside these days, and it has become less necessary to control my environment. There is a kind of unstructured order if you will, and I thrive on it. But I still like things done a certain way, if I am to accept them. That way is with awareness. With care.
On the last few Monday mornings I have been driving to a Hindu ashram in Rondebosch East to make sandwiches for patients at several TB and HIV/Aids clinics on the Cape Flats. I believe I get more out of the exercise than the two hours of effort I put in. I hope the people who eat the sandwiches feel some of the care I put into making them.
They pray over food a lot at the ashram, offering prasad to God before they share the blessed food among whomever is present. It doesn't taste any differently. An apple that's been prayed over is still just an apple. Yet there are some who believe that the molecular structure of food can be altered by such a blessing. Prasad means "that which gives peace". I don't know how much peace the hungry patient gets from a peanut butter sandwich, my guess is they have more immediate physiological needs.
We're a totally mixed bag of volunteers, mostly women, which was kind of fitting on this Women's Day. There's dear auntie Una from Kromboom Road, who tells of the fabulous fish breyani at her neighbour's birthday party on the weekend. There's an articulate hippie called Sue in sensible shoes, bohemian t-shirt and baggy pants. Her voice is pleasing, her demeanour calm.
Gracefully tall Shirley from Hout Bay has seven sisters and moves like a dancer. She has brought along two of her siblings for the sandwich-making service. They don't look like her. Diana, a regular at the ashram, sounds like she has spent most of her seventy-odd years inhaling Texan Plain.
Tessa, an editor, has work waiting for her at home. Her grooming is immaculate; I can imagine her doing her job with meticulousness. Grandpa Colin is the only gentleman, and what a gentle man he is. People come and go; they help for half an hour before they go to yoga or attend a study group. Baie hande maak ligte werk. It really does.
What does all this have to do with my control issues, I hear you ask. It's the thing about the care, or lack of it. There are a lot of brown loaves to get through on a Monday morning, at least 150. We work in an assembly line around an elongated kitchen island with tubs of margarine at the one end, jam or peanut butter in the middle, and a wrapping station at the other end, where a series of sturdy boxes wait to receive the final offering. On the wall behind us is a list of instructions which enables new volunteers to fit in seamlessly and function as efficiently as any old hand.
Yet people don't care. Margarine is swiped across the middle of a slice, the edges remaining dry. (The sandwiches are delivered to the clinics only a day later.) No need to knead the peanut butter, just slap it down in thick, careless chunks and pass on to the next person. It's for poor people anyway. They don't know any better. They should be grateful for getting this much.
Beggars can't be choosers.
I hate this attitude. Just because something is for free, does not mean that the recipient should be satisfied with second best. Because they are poor, and perhaps also feeling ill, they deserve something made with care, put together with some awareness, not slapped together without a conscious thought while yakking continuously. Jeez, a bunch of women together like that can talk about a whole lot of nothing, and all at the same time.
[I'm also mildly irritated by the other extreme - a well-meaning soul suggesting that the people at the end of the assembly line "seal in the prana" by manipulating the waxed paper into a double fold before turning the edges under in one smooth movement. You ain't sealing in any life forces, New Age lady. Just wrap the friggin' sarmies and put them in the box.]
So I do my part, probably slower, and in silence. And I think, what if the swamis should decide to declare the sandwich-making service a silent meditation. Would quiet lips lead to more awareness of what one's hands are doing? Would people put more care into their task, rather than thoughtlessly throwing together slices and requiring gratitude from the recipients?
I don't know. And since I have no control over the awareness of others, I can only attend to my own activity and hope that somehow, someone who takes a bite of a wholewheat sandwich with margarine spread to the edges and soft peanut butter, wrapped securely and with thought of the receiver, will be nourished by more than the sum of its parts.
