Yesterday I sat in a laundromat for a good chunk of the afternoon. Understandably, I expected it to be a fairly brain-numbing and/or depressing experience. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I started to feel a bizarre sense of peace and happiness, which I don’t think came about just because the reality couldn’t have been much worse than my expectations (see unbelievably undeveloped March 1 expectation-related post) or that sunlight was streaming through the windows onto white bright walls and washing machines (see environment-related posts). Seeing as I had a lot of time in which to do nothing other than try (unsuccessfully) to eat my yoghurt without a spoon, I found myself trying to figure out the root of this unexpected Saturday afternoon tranquility, and I came up with this:

I was in the silent company of ordinary people doing an ordinary mundane task. For everybody, however, that mundane task was playing a small but important role in the smooth progression of their lives. In a laundromat, everyone is equal and everyone can experience the rarity that is parallel yet uncompetitive and harmonious progress, something which you can’t even find in other ordinary mundane tasks. Everybody at the supermarket, for example, is there for the same general purpose of buying groceries, but think about the unspoken competition between the yummy mummies in the baby food aisle. One wants to be seen buying organic, another wants to buy the supermarket’s own brand to appear thrifty, etc. [You could argue that in the laundromat there is competition between underwear sizes, but in my case, and for the sake of this post, all clothing was well hidden in washers or dryers, out of sight and out of mind.]

I was then reminded of something I learnt when reading the article ‘5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy But Won’t‘ the other day: Nigeria has the highest percentage of happy people than any other country in the world (click here for the 2003 BBC News article). Perhaps one reason for this is that, for want of a drastically better analogy, more Nigerians are spending time at the laundromat than at the supermarket. They’re not faced on a daily basis with the same overwhelming number of possible routes to ‘happiness’ that many worryingly materialistic, wasteful and ignorant nations present, so they don’t worry so much about choosing the right ones. They’ve then got more time and energy to invest in feeling satisfied about getting their laundry done, as it were. And, incidentally, maybe this explains the mysterious but ever-appreciated optimism in my own family, my mum having been born in Nigeria and her parents having lived there for twenty years.

I think it’s time to fold up this post before the analogy gets dry… Excuse me while I pack my undies and search for the next flight to Africa.