Look around you on the train. What does every person - from the old woman reading a book to the teenagers rough housing after school - have in common? They are wearing clothes, and those clothes - somehow and someday - must be washed.

Laundry is the disregarded machination that underpins all of society. It represents an egalitarian ideal, one that takes for granted that we all deserve to begin our days with something clean, a fresh start.

New York City has over 1 million buildings, but only about 10% of them have a washing machine and clothes dryer in unit. This means that nearly everyone, save for the richest among us, must congregate in the modern town square: the laundromat. There, we dump our intimacy on a sorting table for all to see: underwear, unknowable stains. We fill shared machines with our lives and watch as they are filtered through an automated ritual of detergent, a cleansing, there is nothing to do but wait.

Laundry is a forced divestment from the attention economy, from capitalism, from the need to do and to run and to go. It is necessarily a meditation. It is a time to do a crossword puzzle, to call your mom. To hum a song from your childhood while you fold. If you did not take this time to pause, to be present - do not fear. You'll be back next week.