The Bath and The Shower — Cultural, Social and Hot or Cold?
If you’ve had a quick glance at my stories so far I think you would be able to easily realise that I have been writing about random books, films (including non-VCE Shakespeare stuff) and once about a podcast. My first story was perhaps more of a “recital of daily life experiences”. This story is more of a filler story while I’m working on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This isn’t any ordinary school and childlike Hamlet with the little definitions on the side of the page. This is the one which you get from the petite little libraries with red carpet and female librarians with a crazy double chin and eclipse shaped glasses and would squawk if you spoke one tiny sliver of words. Maybe that was an exaggeration. So patience be with thee.
From the people I’ve met, most people either look forward to showers, or they either absolutely detest them. The same applies with saunas and steam rooms. Perhaps some people like it because they can enjoy the splash of water or they aren’t shameful being naked and free, without the constraints of clothes. The whole body is enveloped in water and all parts of the body feel the touch of water. Formerly your parents or even yourself, depending on your age may have used the waterfall shower heads. They would literally splash water on your head. But these greedy people couldn’t feel the water enough, so people ended up taking showers for an hour. So that’s why there is the introduction of the tiny hole shower head, it feels more, but in reality, it’s much less. Some people still showered for one hour with this invention. That’s just another concept.
And some strange people also fear the shower, they avoid it and is one of the many parts of the day they hate. Some people think they lose their scent, but that really isn’t true. A more social explanation for this is that they lose their charisma, their feeling, their feeling of being not cleansed, and how they act? It’s like a risk of change (the English teacher rants on that in the past VCA papers that there is a common denominator in all of the topics — there is change). For example if a naughty boy is trying to steal a chocolate from the fridge when he already has one in his pocket, why risk the force of the almighty father’s belt or mother’s slipper? Similarly, if the woman loves her smooth hair, she can’t risk it being tangled. But that is not the most iron fist reason why people detest showers.
Imagine you finish your luxurious hot shower, turn it off and suddenly the feeling of cold comes upon you. You are shivering cold, your teeth is rattling. You suddenly reach for your towel and wrap it around you, and rock side to side like a penguin (that’s a bad example, penguins don’t feel cold, they just huddle). There are still droplets rolling down your skin, but you can’t bother drying, you would rather retain your heat, wrapped in your trustworthy towel. But you have to school, to work, or to whatever wondrous world and the thought of a warm pizza enlightens you.
What should we make of this little description? People enjoy the feeling of shower, but they don’t actually. It’s the feeling of emerging out of the shower that makes you feel bad. There is way more than just a shower — there are many cultural and social references to the shower around the world. I’ll be diverting for a short while. To introduce you to the religious world of showers, let me tell you about an experience of mine. I attended a Catholic school and I listened to the parish priest, Father Jude Pirotta. He was a very open person and even accepted people of different beliefs.
He’s a great man, search his name up, he’s famous. But anyways while he was speaking to us, he said, “Just like we take a shower to clean the body, and we put soap and everything then put water, we go to church to cleanse our soul”. Christianity did believe that showering had so many benefits related to God, it would purify the soul, and although I am not a Christian myself his words were for everyone. I still remember saying to us in our Graduation ceremony saying, “Although you may leave our school, you will always be part of our community”. Still feel part of very first school community, very far from home.
Okay, that was another deviation. There are many religions that abide by showering as a sign of purifying the soul and being a better person. In the Sikh religion, people bathe in the water in front of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab. This is merely one of the many religions that follow by this tradition of having shower.
“Bathing is not just about removing the dirt from our bodies. In many cultures and religions, ablutions have potent symbolic meanings and ritual power.
Masako Fukui wrote this quote and tries to expose how showering is not something which is perfunctory and is something which we neglect and forget about, it has symbolic meaning. And it also raises many other notions to consider in our lives. “Hamman” is another term of bathing in which many Muslims consider a very important part of their lives. It is like a ritual. What many of us view as a simple bath, in tiny basins is much more inherently in different civilisations. Here’s an article, about a writer who tells their experience in a Moroccan Hamman bath:
Okay, what about an evident example? I’m sure you’ve heard of an Onsen, thousands of these Japanese baths in Japan and a few in Australia if you’re lucky. They have natural springs too in Japan which makes them more beneficial. These are not just for enjoyment but in fact they originated from Buddhism where people had hot baths (natural) to heal the ill.
Masako Fukui wrote an article on this issue and explores how in Onsens and other religions nudity wasn’t to shame and the notion of communal bathing. You can read it here:
Now to tell about my latest revelation which I promised in the title, or maybe what I had inferenced. My mother works in a clinic, and the doctor is very chatty, as they are both from similar backgrounds. She is also blabbing about how health is important and how you should eat this, and not that. My mom loves to watch those inspirational Ayurveda videos which would discuss different health benefits. One day my mom stumbled on a video about cold showers. It was easy to sway her and the new doctrine in the household was to have cold showers everyday. I was very reluctant at first. But my mom was darting at me.
It was literally freezing and I would only dare dip a limb at a time in the cold water that deluged from the shower head. My mom wouldn’t move until I would fully completely take a dip. So I stepped in and it was so cold, that this weird feeling came over my body. So far, you’re probably convinced that cold showers is not something to undergo. But wait! When the shower turns off, the warmth of the air is absolutely comforting and purifying. That is true warmth. Not a hot steamy shower.
And what happen if people don’t like this warmth? Then take a look at some of the scientific benefits of a cold shower.
- Reduced stress levels
- Higher level of alertness
- Robust immune response
There’s some wonderful scientific research done by WIM HOF Method. Check it out.
I fell in love with cold showers. But one day my mom kept sneezing and the doctor said — it may because of the cold shower. Like my mother says, “Always trust your parents, teacher and doctor”, we went back to hot showers.
Perhaps one day I would experience the true shower of a Hamman or an Onsen, rather than just write on Medium.
Coming Up!
- Do you deserve to be an Omnivore?
- Hamlet: ‘A Murder Most Foul’
- ‘On Chesil Beach’
