Doctrinal Note:
Making the Bed
22 October 2014
I had the idea, yesterday, of devoting today’s entry to the question, whether and why it is a good thing to make the bed in the morning.
Almost anyone who notices an unmade bed — an unmade bed that he or she has rumpled by sleeping in it — will probably be driven to make it. That’s a curious phrase, to “make the bed.” It suggests that the assemblage of boards and blankets, mattress and pillows is not a proper bed until its elements have been arranged in an orderly fashion, with sheets flattened out and tucked in, and with pillows laid out neatly by the headboard. Sleep is disorderly; only the very ill and the dead lie in a bed without disturbing it. In some deep sense, probably akin to the motivation that compels us to cover ourselves up in public, an unmade bed is not a bed at all. It is just a mess.
Why make the bed, though, if it is only going to be unmade hours later? Why not accept the inevitability of mess, and learn to live with it? Why not let the soiled clothes and dirty dishes pile up until they all have to be washed at once? Doesn’t it make more sense to ignore problems until they must be dealt with, and then to deal with them in a batch? And is a mess really a mess if there is no one to see it but you?
There are some good reasons for leaving the bed unmade. Airing out the sheets and the mattress is important. The average person, I read somewhere, sweats the equivalent of a cup of water during a night’s sleep. If we were more concerned about hygiene than we apparently are, we would hang out our sheets and blankets instead of folding and stretching them on top of each other. In short, we don’t make the bed because it’s the healthy thing to do.
Why bother?
(I wanted to work my way toward a sunny upland in which the “bother” of making the bed would disappear, to be replaced by pure pleasure. I would sing of the joy of being in touch with the rhythms of life. Making the bed, and taking care of all the other household chores, would be endowed with an ecstatic aura. Simple things! The thrill of being alive!
It’s amazing, how the damage caused by reading New Age texts during one’s impressionable youth can still be felt decades later. There is no rapturous answer to “why bother?” There is only the bother.)
Kathleen and I talked about it last night. It is almost always I who makes the bed, but when I was in the hospital last month, Kathleen found herself doing the straightening up. She said that it was demoralizing to come home to a messy bedroom after a trying day. This prudential outlook is probably the most effective goad to good housekeeping. It’s a kind of insurance against the vicissitudes of life: if a tidy house won’t always cheer you up after a bad day, at least it won’t make you feel worse. To put it the other way, you can afford to have a sink full of dirty dishes and an overflowing laundry hamper only if things are going really well. Can you count on that?
But there’s more to it than prudence.
I keep coming back to the importance of private life for the growth of true self-respect.
“Private life” seems to mean very little to people today. In a horrible manipulation of our visual wiring, the makers of television shows have taught us that nothing is quite as real as an image captured on a screen. News stories can be far more exciting, traumatic, and ultimately stressful for television viewers than they are for the people living through them in the real world. Television professionals know how to edit out everything that distracts from the point of a story — the drudgery, the unintended consequences. Social media demonstrate that ordinary people have learned the lesson. In learning how to present ourselves most favorably, we learn how to live most publicly.
Taking good care of yourself when no one is watching has become confused with taking good care of yourself as if everyone were watching. Solitude has become meaningless. But it is where each of us really lives. We are all visitors here, each experiencing an uncertain, one way sojourn on earth. The only good thing that any of us can lay firm claim to is self-respect, and self-respect has to be earned, over and over, every day. Its components are many and complex. The reasonable belief that we are making the best of what we have is a large part of self-respect. Our generosity to others is an important element, and a very tricky one, too, for generosity itself must always exceed the satisfaction that we derive from being generous. (In other words, it is impossible to be generous enough.) Increasingly, human self-respect depends on a sense of leaving the world — the environment, the planet — no worse than we found it. A hard and bitter responsibility this is, for generations raised on thoughtless exploitation.
I wrote yesterday that we have become the gods that we used to dread: it is we who can destroy the world. Fear and trembling will not be helpful in coming to grips with this dreadful destiny. Only self-respect can prevent our too-potent weaknesses from devouring us.
Self-respect begins in privacy, whether we experience privacy alone or in an intimate relationship with another. It is in private that we manifest what we have truly learned about living human lives. If we have learned little or nothing — if making the best use of our skills and interests is unimportant, if generosity is merely unprofitable, if the state of the world is somebody else’s problem — then we live in disorder and mess.
So: make the bed already.