I was just vacuuming a room (not at my house) after I was asked to check out a vacuum that wouldn’t work. I’m good at fixing things- I get asked stuff like this all the time, so I checked it out.
I ran through the thing and turned it on and it seemed fine, except the brushes weren’t spinning.
Because they weren’t turning on. Easy peasy, press the pedal and they whirred away. But i’ve got to test it to make sure, otherwise how do you know?
So I started vacuuming around the living room, where I was checking it out. Because how else do you test a vacuum to make sure it’s working properly? You use it. If it sucks, it’s good to go. But you don’t know until you use it.
The room was pretty open, hardwood floors, but it needed a vacuum. You know, dog hairs, daily kid traffic, whatever. So without really thinking about it, I began vacuuming the front entry and dining room.
What happened as I did it absolutely blew me away.
As I guided the vacuum on a choreographed routine around I began thinking about my work week and running through some pretty high level things I was going to have to talk to people about.
I’m a business development consultant with some clients that do pretty high level things in the world. I’m grateful for the cool conversations things I get to have, and I was reminded of something that one of them mentioned to me: he said that he would never let anyone vacuum his office because that was his time to think.
I never really understood it until the very moment where I was doing the very thing.
But as I vacuumed the floor of a home of a friend’s I was able to solve some of my world’s problems that might have taken a lot longer to do through the more directed methods.
What I’m getting at is that these simple tasks can be meditative and can get you closer to whatever goal you’re working on. It doesn’t matter if it’s on your time or someone else’s time, use it to plan your next move, work through some hurt, ponder a solution, or simply be grateful.