Water Practice

A new series of prompts inviting ritual and reflection

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Hello,

Yesterday morning, I filled the kettle and put it on to boil. Then I emptied out the teapot, spilling yesterday’s dark tea into the sink. I ran the tap to rinse away the tannic stain, and then let it run and run and run, waiting for the heat to come through.

All that water, circling down the drain. I do it every morning. It’s the only way to get a bowl of hot soapy water to wash up the pot, to leave it fresh and warm. Otherwise, the tea is cold and limescaley, strange and grey.

I hate to waste water, and yet I do it every day. When I’m alert enough, I divert it into the watering can, the dog’s bowl, the hopper in the coffee machine; on days when I’m tired, I let it run down the waste pipe while I push my daily pills through their foil packaging, line them up on the kitchen surface to swallow.

The morning is full of small precisions like this, thoughtless rituals. They get me through the first hazy minutes of the day without demanding anything from me. Some days, a part of me rises up to scold myself for my wasteful habits, the zombie disposability of my days. On others, a different voice tells me that I am doing no worse than anyone else, and that my job is to simply find a way through without exhausting myself.

Both are true. It is a terrible thing to waste water. It is a ridiculous thing to believe that one individual can correct the extractive path we have taken. I have to forge an impossible balance between the two.

Image via Shutterstock

A lot of my life is like that. I feel like I’m eternally wavering between ideology and constraint. When I browse on Instagram or Substack, everyone else seems so full of certainty; I have none of it. In fact, I feel as though I am endlessly forced to compromise, and it’s so disappointing to realise that I’m the fallible kind of human, rather than the perfect kind. And yet at this particular moment in history, when so much that seemed good is being displaced, I feel more pressure than ever to do something meaningful, to solve the world.

Perhaps, instead, I can learn to proceed more mindfully, in a way that invites reflection, connection and gentle change. I’ve lived long enough to understand that nothing works if it’s not sustainable for me.

For that reason, I’m starting a new series on The Clearing.

Introducing The Practices

In this new series, I’m going to invite you to make a deeper connection with the building blocks of everyday life, taking a mindful look at the things we often take for granted - or which we would rather not think too hard about - and trying to understand what they mean to us. My aim is to avoid being didactic or judgemental, but instead to investigate parts of our unknowing; to simply notice rather than assume.

The familiar journaling prompts will still be there, but I’ll be adding suggestions for ritual, exploration and experimentation - an invitation to do something active, or to find your own route through. I’d love to hear your ‘findings’ too - the processes you enter, the creative work that emerges, the reflections that bubble up or the ways you take these ideas into your everyday life.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Water Practice