In The Shower

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

In The Shower

There’s just something about taking a shower. It’s amazing to me just how easily you can all of a sudden put the brakes on everything else in your life and just be in the moment. In a way, it makes me think of the famous counter-culture phrase from the 60s: Turn on, tune in, drop out. Turn on the water. Tune it to the shower. Drop out. The constant noise inside my head involving the happenings of life: The stress. The tasks and errands. Thinking of the future. Thinking of the past. Regrets. Hopes. Dreams. As soon as the water runs out of the shower head and that thunderous, aquatic applause begins to reverberate off the shower and bathroom walls, it’s as if someone hit the mute button inside my head. Nothing else matters. I’m tucked behind the curtain and nothing else exists outside my little space. Naked. No more masks. No one to please. No more outfits. Nothing to cover up who I am. Just me. Sometimes when I turn the shower on, I like to turn the shower head downwards and stand back from the water and just listen to it as it falls down and collides with the shower floor. Just listening to the white noise of the water itself. It allows me to meditate in a very basic sense. By general defintion, meditation is assigning the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace. I don’t have to listen to what other people tell me. I don’t have to take orders from work. I don’t have to worry about getting a particular thing completed. I don’t have to worry about the future or the past or anything else. All I have to do is stand there and listen. Just listen. Then, when I finally do step into the water, the feeling of it brings on something completely different. We’ve all seen those scenes in the movies where a person has just woken up or they’re really stressed out and they step into the shower and just tuck their head into their chin while placing their hands on the wall beneath the shower head and let the water splash and cascade over their head and slowly down their body. I do it too. I do it almost every time. The sensation of feeling the water hitting the top of my head and slowly rolling and tickling down my body. It’s as close to a massage as you can get without a set of hands there. Thousands of tiny, liquid fingers working all the finer points of my body. Rubbing into the top of my skull. Rolling down my neck and shoulders. Tickling like spider legs down my front and back, in between my thighs and down your legs. Watery vines wrapping, twisting and turning around my body. Soaking me and bringing my skin to life. Massaging sore muscles after a work out. Kneading away the kink in my neck and shoulder from a stressful day. Cleansing away the sweat and dirt and filth that may be bogging me down (both physically and figuratively). I like to play with temperature as well. I like to test myself sometimes. If I need a bit of a slap in the face, so to speak, a sharp temperature change in the water can all of a sudden bring me out of whatever galaxy or wonderland I was just in and can sit me firmly back in my place. Icy cold water making me catch my breath as if I’d come out of a dead sprint or a passionate lover had brought me to the apex of a particularly strong orgasm. Scalding hot water bringing me to a boil as I gnash my teeth and grip my knuckles tight, watching my skin turn from pink to red, but I hold on just a little bit longer because the pain of it all is surprisingly refreshing.

To most, a shower is just water, soap and shampoo. It’s what you do when you wake up, after you work out, before you go out or go to bed. It’s a daily activity that gets lost in the mix of so many other things, and yet we can count on it to refresh us when so many other options prove fruitless. Have a shower. Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.

This post is completely random, I know. I just had a nice shower and I’m feeling pretty good, so I decided to write about showers. Go figure.