Making Beds and Fresh Starts

Bed: Made
Life: Working On It

For whatever reason, today—a random Tuesday in the middle of April—is a fine day to start my life.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve made such a proclamation, at least to myself. There’s been many a time that I took stock of what I had and said, “Yup, time to take charge of this mess.” I’m sure this isn’t unique to me. We have a holiday at the start of the year dedicated to starting our lives anew.

But today, yes, today. Today is different. Today I took stock of what I had and took some charge of it. No holiday prompts, no societal expectation. All it was, was me saying it needed to be done.

Thus, the made bed.

Making a bed doesn’t seem like much. Put the sheet on, make it look nice, and you’re done. But as this article at the Art of Manliness shows, there is a proper way. And it is more than throwing a sheet down. It involves tucking in the sides, making hospital corners, and—fine, not that much work. Still, it took some work, at least more than the simple “snap the blanket into the air and let it fall where it may” that I’d been doing.

But what does a clean-looking bed have to do with fresh starts?

It’s symbolic. (Yeah, I'm that pretentious guy.) Your bed can look much like your life after a night: crumpled sheets, pillows every which way, and somehow the blanket made its way to the floor. And you did all that without knowing it. So, too, can it be with our lives. We’re in ruts, bad situations, making the same mistakes over and over, with no idea on how we’ve gotten ourselves in such a mess.

It’s also all too easy to leave the mess as is. It’ll only happen again, so why bother? This, too, is a mindset we can find ourselves. How many times have we thought, My problems will never go away because I’m such-and-such person and I’ll never change. Easy to leave the mess, you see?

Unless you get some thrill out of a messy room, the simple act of making your bed brings order. There is some downside to order. This study concludes, as it says in the title, that disorder aids creativity. But order and the act of bringing order can reduce stress, and less stress makes us happy. If you want a mess for creativity, keep a messy desk.

If that bit of order—all because of one made bed—can bring benefit, what if we could make our lives a little more ordered? And we have more going for our lives than our bed does. The mess we make in our sleep can’t be helped: we’re not mentally there. But the mess we make of our lives? We can be wide awake for that and maybe not make the mess at all.

But that takes time. If you’re not in the habit of making your bed, you’ll have a hard time doing it until one day, you’re making your bed and not reminding yourself to do it. You just do it. Same, too, with our lives. We won’t stop making messes because—unless you’re the legitimate Buddha—we’re not always aware of what we do. But we can reduce the messes we make and learn to clean up faster.

So, I challenge you. Make your bed. Bring some order in. We can clean the mess.