I am what most people would call busy. And I love it.

There’s a magnetic thrill, a pulse of energy that comes from rushing from one place to another, from scheduling meetings perfectly so that they fill an afternoon, and from flipping between diverse projects. I enjoy falling asleep knowing that I have worked all day and that my work has been good.

In the morning, I wake up slowly, far slower than you would imagine given my typical attitude of hurry. I stroll into my feeble excuse for a kitchen, and I pull a bag of grapes from the refrigerator. I cut a bundle from the bunch, and I begin to pluck them, wash them, roll them between my hands, one by one, to clear them of pesticides and dirt. It’s a slow-going job.

The work that keeps me busy all day takes place entirely on my computer. The few exceptions are the books I read, which are the closest thing to the material world that I touch in my working day.

Except for the handling of my laptop and my books, the work I do is entirely devoid of material touch or physicality.

There’s a special way to pluck grapes so that you pull a small bit of fiber and maybe a little seed (no grape is truly seedless) from the fruit. You have to feel each grape for its strong middle and pull slowly, straight from the top—not breaking it off like my sister does.

Riper grapes are more honest, giving you more fiber and seeds than grapes ready to fall.

I suppose there’s no real point to plucking grapes in this way. It doesn’t affect the taste or texture at all. Nor is there a point to washing them one by one, or to rolling them between my hands. I bog down my mornings by taking an excruciating fifteen minutes to do what should be a two-minute job.

So much of my life, of my work, exists only in the intellectual and digital realm. I write for online platforms like Odyssey, I do graphic design for a missionary based in Colorado, I research topics for papers, and I copy-edit on the side. I am busy thinking and designing and writing and revising. And I love it.

But every morning, I devote fifteen minutes to a task that is mindless, repetitive, and material. It has no quantified measure of success beyond a portion of clean grapes, and it takes me far too long to work my way through its process. And I love it.

We are not purely minds, nor are we senseless bodies. We are a body-soul hybrid, a unique creature of creation. As such, we create with our bodies and with our souls.

All day, my soul and mind are working towards their intellectual creations. But in my morning ritual of washing my grapes, I am giving my body the opportunity to do its work of physical creation.

The busyness that my life is constructed around sometimes feels unreal, despite its constancy. I lose myself in the schedule, in the email, in the blank stare of an empty Word document. The more time I spend in the immaterial, the more joy I find in returning to the tangible—and the more I am reminded of my need for both.