HS
Last night I took a bath and today I have to write a blog post, so as luck would have it now you get to hear about my newfound outlook on the nature of bath-taking. I can tell you’re on the edge of your seat already. Now, I know some people are already at a disadvantage because they might not have a bath at home. “How am I going to relate to this?” you’re thinking, unimpressed at my choice of subject before you’ve even heard what I have to say. To that I would respond, 1. Not everything is about you, and 2. Just hear me out, I am going somewhere with this…I think. It’s a widely accepted idea that baths and stress relief go hand in hand. People stick the word ‘relaxing’ in front of the word ‘bath’ as if they just belong together, as if you wouldn’t dream of using any other adjective to describe a bath other than that one. I don’t know if you’ve ever played the computer game Sims 4, so allow me to explain briefly: when sim people don’t do anything fun for a long period of time they get ‘tense’ and they huff and puff all over the place and won’t do anything you tell them to do. But all of a sudden, if you plonk them in the bath, they’re irritability dissipates and they’re as carefree as can be. I guess the general consensus is that this mimics real life, but I’ve always been unconvinced. Over the summer I was reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and over the summer I was also taking a lot of baths. There’s a popular quote from The Bell Jar where Plath says “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.” I can remember reading that, sweltering in the sun of a Boston heatwave, mind you, and thinking to myself that’s an endearing idea, Sylvia, but I don’t know if it’s all that true. I’ve never found any consoling or calming effect in taking a bath; I mostly just do it as something to do. I was thinking about how everyone from the people who made Sims 4 to Sylvia Plath can’t be wrong, and wondering why I don’t achieve the same Zen feeling everyone else seems to, despite the fact that I consider myself quite the bath aficionado. Finally, about 5 minutes before I started writing this, it hit me: I’ve been doing baths wrong all my life. My dad lives in America and in his house in America there’s a television in the bathroom. Not a fancy one or anything, as a matter of fact it’s quite an old one, but he’s had this set-up since I was about nine years old. It’s original function was so that you could watch TV in the bath, although a few summers ago when I was over the two of us came up with the bright idea of getting a clear shower curtain, so now you can watch TV in the shower too. But that’s beside the point. When I visit him in America I take a bath almost every day, for no real reason other than to watch TV and maybe bring some snacks in with me too. It’s almost comical. In my everyday life, however, there is no TV in the bathroom. Hence, I never bothered to take baths in my own house up until very recently. I’ve gotten fond of it lately though, because I’ve found myself new distractions to compensate for the absence of a television. I bring in music and even take the heart-stopping risk of using my phone over the water. I keep full text conversations going with people when I’m supposed to be relaxing. It’s no wonder I didn’t get what Sylvia meant. The first sentence after the paragraph I quoted from The Bell Jar is “I meditate in the bath.” How am I supposed to meditate if I won’t put my phone down or switch off the TV? How am I supposed to think calming thoughts, or any thoughts at all if I won’t turn off the music and exist in the silence, even just for a few minutes? I think everyone is guilty of this in their own way. I mean, think about it: when’s the last time you just…stopped? I’m asking for a time when your phone was nowhere to be seen and you weren’t engaged in any conversation and you weren’t making a to-do list in your head for the week and you were just being. I know I don’t have one, because evidently my attention span is so short that I need to put my electronic appliances’ wellbeing in danger just to stay in the bath for twenty minutes. I’m not really preaching the ‘put the phone away and pay attention to your life’ thing, I’m trying more for a ‘take a few minutes to just stop and be’ sort of thing. I’m not even going to tell you it’s easy either. You can actually feel the resistance of your mind wanting to go get something done or distract itself in some way, rather than just staying stagnant and letting things be as they are and nothing more. Relaxing takes a certain amount of focus and effort, even though that may seem contradictory. It is important to make a point of slowing down to a stop once in a while, though. I really believe that. Go take a bath, and do it correctly please. And if you don’t have a bath, find something else to do that fulfills the same objective, I guess. I’m can’t come up with all the answers for you.
HS
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