Longing for the Deep Peace of Mindless Tasks

Boy, do I love me a good grocery store run.

The kind where your list is long and the crowds are thin and there’s no particular hurry to be finished.  

The kind where the samples are abundant and a clearance bin beckons and you are at liberty to read as many labels as you please.

I could wander the aisles of my neighborhood grocery store for hours.

Parents are often reminded that grocery shopping shouldn’t qualify as self-care.

Don’t mistake menial errands for true rest, goes the warning. You deserve a break that’s an actual break, and, no, running errands for your family doesn’t qualify in the way that a Thai massage or a steaming-hot bath with the door locked might.

Maybe I’m hopelessly behind the times, but the grocery store is my happy place. It’s where I regroup and gather my scattered energies and reconnect with a sense of inner calm that often dissipates by the end of a long weekend stuck indoors with my preschooler.

The peace of a grocery run lies in the repetition and also in the spontaneity; the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket offer a potent mix of utter sameness and unexpected surprise.  

There’s the reliably pleasant process of poking at produce, of checking the price of cauliflower, of sampling stinky cheese cubes and exotic slices of blood orange.

There’s the subversive act of tossing an overpriced cosmetic item or scented candle into the cart, because amid the mess of produce and packaged items, who’s ever gonna know? That 10-inch receipt will cover my tracks well enough. These cosmic freebies remind me I’m alive and autonomous, and in possession of enough disposable income to treat myself to little pleasures. That I’m capable of caprice, despite my weighty mantle of familial responsibilities.

Now, the bi-weekly grocery run is different, of course. Like everything else. So different.

And I don’t mean the masked checkers sealed off behind plastic partitions or the shoppers’ queue stretching through the parking lot like a Soviet bread line.

It’s different because it’s now an essential errand, and it’s meant to be executed efficiently. Pestilence threatens from the handle of the shopping cart. You are asked only to touch the piece of produce you plan to buy, and forget about sniffing it. And, out in the rain, others are waiting their turn to enter, so please don’t dally.

What’s worse, the ascendancy of a more contagious strain of COVID has lately forced me to acknowledge that the grocery store represents an unnecessary exposure, and one I ought to avoid. I have grudgingly started sending my healthier husband out in my stead, and I’ve also begun to rely on delivery app services, with their opaque fees and their unethical business practices and their questionable item substitutes.

The results are often disappointing; my husband tries, but can’t locate the instant macaroni that’s both GF and dairy-free.

The Instacart shopper gets her wires crossed at Costco and brings us a jumbo pack of the most enormous hot dogs I’ve ever seen — mutant links that have partially thawed on the trip over and so later refreeze themselves into a monstrous undifferentiated lump of pink pork that my daughter absolutely will not eat.

But I’m not primarily complaining about the inconvenience of getting something that’s not quite what I wanted. Nor am I lamenting the semantic jiujitsu required to state, with utter precision, the exact kind of gluten-free macaroni dinner that you want.

That would be insensitive, after all; others have lost so very much more.

Can I just say that I miss the deep peace I once gleaned from these hourlong domestic interludes? I miss the escapism and the calm and the cosmetics and the candles. I miss the sense of being alone among anonymous others, of getting lost in my thoughts. I miss the blood oranges and the slow, meandering strolls and maybe even the wobbly cart wheels.

I long for the delightful impulses of the deli counter and the sushi cooler, the row of greasy rotisserie chickens sunning themselves beneath the metal warming lamp. I miss snacking on chocolate on the drive home and then packing my pantry with tasty food before lovingly folding up the paper bags as I regale my husband with tales of the discounted items I snagged and perhaps a confession of the indulgences, too.

As far as COVID woes go, this is minor league stuff. I get that.

And can’t I just wring a bit of inner peace out of some other mindless diversion? Sure, I can. Scrubbing a window, pulling a weed, bathing my child. These things, too, offer a kind of balm, a momentary ruminative escape.

But when it comes to inciting full-on Zen?

Give me a grocery store, a long list, an hour to waste. And maybe a clearance bin or two.

It is an errand as utterly restorative as it is mundane.  

And I miss it terribly.