Conversations in the Shower

Conversations in the Shower

I realized this morning, through a groggy haze as I tried to co-ordinate breakfast for my brood of cranky recruits, that I can only count of any real mental clarity twice in the run of any 24 hour period. The first is a fairly well known cliché - I'm a nighthawk, one of those rare and much maligned creatures of the twilight. The hours hidden between the moonlight and the dawn are mine.

But I have one other time when my head is clear and ideas flow like a spring run-off. It’s in the shower. It’s the only place I have truly to myself, where I can ignore every demand that is made of me, ignore the voices hollering for me to do something, get something, answer something, solve something, clean something, fix something, make something, buy something, wipe something, hug something, look at something, listen to something. When I hear the sound of the plastic crinkling as I pull the curtain across aluminum spring bar, I am closing the vinyl veil of my own confessional and I am at quiet, if wet, peace.

With the water raining down on me in a tumult of pressure and mist, I close my eyes and let my imagination take flight. On autopilot, I tend to the purposeful ministrations of the shower, idly lathering, scrubbing, and rinsing with no particular urgency attached to the tasks. But then, these are peripheral activities to my thoughts.

In the shower I compose great classical tales worthy of hard-cover publication, solve cumbersome work problems that have plagued me with an unformed sense of anxiety, work out difficult dialogues with unyielding employers, and negotiate truces with unpleasant people I have yet to encounter. I make long lists of life goals that I may or may not ever attend to, amuse myself with silly rhymes that materialize effortlessly in the steam, sing to myself with the voice of an operatic diva. I work out the lines of paintings not yet conceived, plan all the organizational details of my household, remember the niggling details of car maintenance that elude me during the rest of my waking hours.

I remember people and places long buried in the recesses of years that passed too quickly by, dreaming of the infinite twists and turns that might yet evolve my life. I contemplate philosophical conundrums and search for spiritual answers that are too easily drowned by the litany of monotonous daily tasks. I fly to all the far-flung places I long to visit, wandering through mountain trails and crowded bazaars, mesmerized by the flood of life that boils in the universe and mystified by the repetitious originality of history writing itself in every moment.

I recall the things that bring me pleasure, the little luxuries that I tell myself can wait until there is more time. A thousands ideas flood into my mind cascading and blending, challenging me to do more when I step, shivering and shriveled, back out into the world. In the shower, I see a brief glimpse all the things I could accomplish.... if only I never had to turn the water off.