I’ve recently discovered a way to apply the karmic concept of samsara — the endless wheel of death and rebirth through which we all move — to solve a practical problem: namely, laundry.

For at least at my house, it’s a never-ending cycle, ebbing and flowing like the tide but never truly finding completion.

That, however, I have decided is just fine, because that’s the way laundry is intended to be. If it were ever done, it wouldn’t be laundry. And if I were ever to wash, dry and fold all of it, I just wouldn’t be me.

I assume there are other, perhaps more motivated people who promptly clean their clothes before they have a chance to erupt into a Mount Vesuvius of soiled linen, but I am not one of those people. It helps to tell myself that I am a writer and therefore an artist and am therefore held to a lower housekeeping standard.

“I’m a writer!” I say when I spy my son’s hamper, resplendent with camp shirts and swimsuits and bath towels. “I don’t have time for this. I must return to my art.”

(Feel free to steal that for yourself. It works, whether your art is music, writing or sculpting with your kids’ Play-Doh.)

Now, it took me a while to admit that to myself and even longer to say it out loud to others, that I was a “writer.” I’m fairly well-adjusted for a writer, which is another way of saying that I’m not that great of one, and it had always made me feel a little pretentious to consider myself any kind of artist at all.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m a better writer than average, for sure, perhaps even better than most. But there are above me higher tiers, and it seems the higher one gets in those writerly tiers, the odder one becomes.

Just as an example, Jonathan Franzen — widely accepted as one of the finest living American writers — has spent the last 25 years beefing, alternately, with Oprah Winfrey, cats, Jennifer Weiner, the Audubon Society and the practice of ending phone calls by saying “I love you.”

Almost definitionally, someone who has so many words squatting in their brain that they have to evict some onto a page for another person to deal with is kind of … strange.

And I’ve always wanted to be normal.

I can’t put my finger on the exact root of that deep yearning, but maybe it has something to do with the night my parents sent me to my first sleepover with, instead of a sleeping bag, a neon-red flokati rug so heavy I could barely carry it.

But I have found in my adulthood that there’s power in considering yourself an artist, even just a slightly above-average one, and being strange is more fun than it used to be when I was 8 years old lying on 20 pounds of wool at my first American slumber party.

Now I can find beauty in my uniqueness, poetry in my failings.

And in the wisdom of Eastern religions, I can find explanation (if not justification) for my inability to fully denude my basement floor of dirty clothes.

I’ve found a balance between artistry and normalcy, death and life, a full hamper and an empty one, and it swings between the two, forever, like a giant pendulum.

OK, so my artistry ceiling is a little lower than some, but that’s fine. I’d rather not spend my days fighting with cat people about whether their pets are the nation’s top ecological threat. And conversely, I may not ever have an Instagram-worthy house, tastefully and sparingly decorated in varying shades of gray. That’s fine, too.

Because on the great wheel of life, I’m happy in mid-cycle, just like my laundry.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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