Then it dawned on me. The insight for me was how alike life and laundry were. Despite our best efforts to stay ahead, life keeps relentlessly imposing new piles of issues, problems, responsibilities, deadlines, and stuff needing our attention. No such luck. Or we can step back and alter our expectations.
Life produces dirty laundry.
It's a fact. The cleanest clothes in the world are on corpses. We do our best to sort out what needs attended to immediately and what can wait. My real cleaning task was not on clothing, but on my perspective of the whole affair. How to keep my sense of joy and peace as I go about the continual stream of matters to which I must attend.