Behind the bar is like being inside a diamond. Beams of light dance on glasses and bottles. Liquors, liquids and lassi refract the light.
I push the dirty glasses into the machine and press the button.
63 second ‘Light Wash’.
I polish the steaming clean glasses and whisper.
‘Ek Onkar. Sat Nam. Wahe Guru’.
I alternate my mantras. This one is from Sikhism: ‘One name/God, Truth is thy name. The greatest teacher’. The words feel heavy under my breath.
My lower back and hamstrings feel like one tight band. Stiff from the constant stacking, pushing and polishing. They ease a little when I tune into my breath.
‘oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ suvaḥ...‘
The Gayatri mantra is another I sometimes cycle in. I have been told that my great grandad used this mantra a lot. I met him the year I was born and the year that he died. He was 99 years old.
The Gayatri mantra is so old it is without a straightforward translation. The power of the mantra is reserved in its metre.
PUSH PEARLS, POLISH TURDS.
This is a new mantra. My own addition to the corpus of great sayings. It stands stiff like a Zen koan. Tuned and strung like the fibres of my hamstrings.
I came up with it after watching the 2022 Netflix Documentary, Stutz, by Jonah Hill. Stutz, Jonah Hills’ psychiatrist, replete with dark levity and New York wit, explains one of his tools called the ‘String of Pearls’.
Stutz explains that every time we choose to act, we put a little pearl on a necklace. A small action, especially when it feels difficult, adds to the string.
Jonah Hill adds to this metaphor. As we collect pearls, the world hurls balls of turds towards us. Turds are unforeseen misfortunes. But they aren’t just steaming piles of shit. Just as the pearls contain little shits, big turds encase tiny pearls. You must polish to find them.
Working behind the bar feels like a moment in stasis behind a moving world. The stories I have heard from the wait-staff and fellow bartenders has instilled some conviction in the metaphor used by Stutz.
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To polish a turd is a deeply creative act.
One waitress had moved recently from Tijuana. She had run away. She had learned that her ex-boyfriend was a cartel member. Her cousin had been killed and literally chopped into little pieces. In a horror befitting a movie, the family received a part of his cheek.
Life is full of turds. Turds so magnificent, they could eclipse the sun. If we can act, even in a poo-eclipse, we begin a creative process of transformation.
Another waitress had an electromagnetic energy. When you spoke to her, her eyes never left yours. Tattoos graffitied across her body. A different one seemed to wink at you as you looked her way. A series of small acts had led her to move to Australia with her son. New country, new flat, new visa, new job.
When we notice people as complete pieces, we don’t see the turds that had to be polished away.
She had had a violent divorce with a millionaire who took all her money. She moved across the world to start a new life as a healer. She had been a successful professional in her native country. Despite her past, she refused to be burdened by broken pride or rigid victimhood.
Being human is a creative process tied by the dyad of acceptance and responsibility. We take responsibility to act despite the discomfort. We accept misfortune as gracefully as humanly possible.
A bartender in hindsight reflects that he had OCD. Small patterns ruled his life. He says that he has had transformative spiritual experience that allowed him to distance himself from the obsessions. He is well-versed in Vedic scriptures, as well as the ins and outs a full cocktail menu. He maintains an almost spotless bar amid a flurry of Friday night cocktails.
Curating meaning in our live can only mature once we can consciously string pearls while receiving flurries of shit. When we learn to polish turds, we can even learn to love the process.
A young man who had just joined the bar had had psychotic episodes triggered by substances. Despite the horror of scaling the feeble walls of sanity, his experience had given him first-hand experience of so-called ‘mental health’. In the jaws of fear, he had snatched a tooth of wisdom and escaped without being wholly swallowed.
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When I was younger, I loathed to think that there was work to be done. The idea of effort and work seemed like a blemish on existence itself. I hoped one day I would not ever need to put effort in anything.
I came to see that everything required effort. My childlike aversion matured into an unsteady adolescence where effort was painful yet necessary. Effort and discipline became a masochism to get what I wanted from the world.
Push pearls, polish turds. The work in life that is unavoidable doesn’t have to be gargantuan. It can be small and non-severe. Taking responsibility while inviting the limitless possibility of stringing together small undramatic actions. Accepting misfortune like dirty plates at a delicious feast. And then fall in love with washing the bowls.
