Laundry Basket Theory

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - Jul 2016

As is the case with most of the homes we also have a laundry basket in which all the clothes that need to be washed are stored. Every time we take a set of clothes to the washing machine we carefully separate the dark colored ones lest their colors affect the lighter ones. We also separate those clothes that cannot be machine washed and together they go back to the laundry basket.

This practice continued for a while till we reached a day when the basket got piled up with such clothes that cannot be washed in the machine. We’d a problem in hand! The basket will never get empty with this pile of clothes and we started worrying about how to resolve this since manually washing that pile of clothes in one day was an impossible task. We decided to do something smarter.

Every day we started to soak one of the clothes each from the pile which could not be washed in the machine. On a given day even when we had clothes washed in the machine it was not a burden to wash this one piece manually. As days progressed the pile of clothes that had to be hand washed became smaller and smaller and soon enough our laundry basket was totally empty! Suddenly we had nothing to worry about with respect to the laundry.

Do you see any similarity to this laundry basket to the tensions we’ve in our lives? Over a period of time we accumulate quite a lot of matters in our life about which we are constantly tensed. The thoughts about these items that create stress for you get piled up one on top of the other just like the laundry that needs to be hand washed. Nothing seems to be getting resolved and to make it worse many more get added to the list. Your frustration gets the better of you and you start to snap at every minor incident that affects you and more importantly the people around you.

We should learn to apply here the technique of washing I mentioned earlier. It’ll never help if you try to solve all your challenges together. You’ll neither be able to focus on all of them nor resolve even a single challenge. It is better to tackle them one by one if feasible. Specifically address the issues one after the other and find the resolution to remove them from the list of challenges. After a while you’ll be really happy to see the mountain of challenges getting reduced to a tiny hill or even better.

Have you ever driven or been in a car during an extremely heavy rain with the wiper of the vehicle struggling to clear the large volume of water on the windshield? You’ll experience how difficult it is to drive in such a condition since the road ahead is not clear. You may even have to stop the car for a while till the heavy rains subside. The situation is pretty much the same in our life when we’ve a heap of challenges and we find it quite a struggle to proceed any further. Instead of losing hope we should ideally try this approach of resolving the issues one by one. This is as good as taking a break from driving when you can’t move ahead due to the poor visibility of the path ahead.

Always remember that there isn’t a challenge in this world that cannot be resolved. The degree with which you’ll find a solution for your one challenge may vary from the other. Nevertheless if you approach the challenges all together it may seem to be a daunting task and you may possibly end up not solving anything at all. Hence here is my humble suggestion for you to approach your challenges one step at a time and see if you could reduce the pile of problems you are facing.

So the next time when you see your laundry basket, remind yourself that your tensions are just like that basket. Nothing will be difficult for us if we learn to change our perception about challenges and constantly remind ourselves about this laundry basket theory.

May the good God help you wash off your tensions one cloth at a time! Take care!