What! Will these hands ne'er be clean? No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that; you mar all with this starting.The above lines from Lady Macbeth are haltingly uttered with deep tinges of developing madness and overwhelming guilt. For that dear lady is stained by the blood of her king. A stain that no amount of scrubbing will take away.
A recent chance encounter with a book of plays by William Shakespeare brought this scene from Macbeth to my mind. This in turn led me back to some old memories of an odd fellow that I knew when I was a student. He would spend hours each day in the bathroom washing and rewashing his hands. This was such a strange ritual, that most folks moved to get in and out of the area as quickly as possible, avoiding eye contact at all costs. The thing that elevated this to even a weirder level, was that he would then leave the bathroom, touching the door handle that everyone else touched, and then walk into the public computer room to use the keyboards that were covered with all manner of filth and nastiness deposited by the rest of humanity.
Yet even apart from the details of this story, if you think about it, we all have things that we heavily invest in with our time, our energy, our mind, and our money, that are a complete waste of our resources. Oh if we weren't so blind as to recognize these areas in our life. All sound and fury signifying nothing.
