âMake your bed,â Mom said every morning, immune to any common-sense argument I might offer:
âBut Mom, itâll just get messed up again tonight.â
âMake your bed.â
âBut nobodyâs gonna see it except friends who come over, and they donât care.â
âMake your bed.â
âAnd if anybody else comes over, they wonât see it if I close the bedroom door.â
âMake your bed.â
âBut what if I want to take a nap?â
âMake it again.â
She didnât even offer the courtesy of explaining why I should make the bed â like all those millions of Asian children who would love to have a bed to make every morning and then rush to the table to eat the brussels sprouts I surreptitiously fed to the dog under the table.
No, it was just: âMake your bed.â
And so I made my bed. Every morning. Grudgingly. Convinced it was the biggest waste of time ever spawned in the mind of humankind.
Thatâs why I was surprised to learn, decades later, that making your bed every morning can be a lifesaver.
It was eight years ago, just after my wife suffered her first stroke and spent the next 31 days in the Intensive Care Unit. One of her therapists asked me how I was doing, and I admitted that I felt overwhelmed by the whole experience. Not only did I now have to assume all the duties that we once shared between us, I also had daily visits to the hospital, followed by caregiving duties at home that exhausted and confounded me. âTo be honest,â I told the therapist, âsometimes itâs hard even get up in the morning because I donât even know where to start.â
âMake your bed,â he said.
I stared at him as if he were poking fun at me, but he explained:
âSure, thereâs a lot to do,â he said. âMore than you can do in a day, or a week, or a month. But itâs not that any of those things are hard to do. Itâs just that there are so many of them. So just start someplace and do one thing. And then do another. And another. And at the end of the day, donât worry about what you didnât get done. Those things can wait until tomorrow. You can do them then â after you make the bed again.â
Of course, some details needed immediate attention, but for most things it didnât matter much if I did them first or last.
âExcept for making the bed,â he said. âDo it even before going to the bathroom or brushing your teeth. That way, your first decision of the day is already out of the way.â
I took his advice, and I felt my depressed helplessness loosen its paralyzing grip on me at once. Besides, now that the bed was made, there was less chance that I would retreat to it during a weak moment later in the day. It was easier to keep going than to rumple the bed and have to make it again.
In time, I came to realize that making the bed first thing in the morning was not just a practical chore â it was also a metaphor.
Because, letâs face it, the world is a messed-up, broken place. So why not make your first action of the day a gesture to restore one ragged edge of it back to some semblance of order?
Oh, you wonât be able to fix the world utterly. Not in a day, or a year, or a lifetime. The world will keep breaking, and you will be part of the reason that it will break. Youâll rumple that bed again tonight.
But tomorrow, first thing, youâll fix itâor at least restore one small part of the damage to how it once was. And your day will begin with one small triumph over the worldâs maddening tendency to keep breaking. Because itâs not only about fixing a broken world. Itâs about fixing your despair over all the damage.
And now that youâve taken that first small step, youâve got a bit of momentum to cancel the inertia that had paralyzed you. Take another step, and then another. The bed is made; youâre on your way.
That advice carried me through the eight years of caregiving for my wifeâs disabilities. And when she died this February from a final, fatal stroke, I awoke the next morning paralyzed by grief. My caregiving chores were over, but I now lay at the start of a new, unknown life, filled with new responsibilities I had never had to address â an endless list of necessities involving the funeral home, insurance companies, social security office, bank accounts, will and trust titles, pension administrationâŚ
But I didnât lie in bed for long that morning, because I knew just where to start.
Today, some three months farther on, most of those necessities have been handled, though not all of them. Iâll tidy them up some other day.
Right after I make the bed.
You donât have to lose a loved one to feel despair, because the world has a maddening ability to break in a million ways. School shootings, global warming, lying politicians, impending wars â the list is endless, and it can freeze you into believing that you are powerless to do anything about it.
But you are not powerless. You canât stop the world from breaking, but you can stave off despair by taking one small healing step every morning, and then see where your next steps lead you.
And once the bed is made, keep going. Resist the temptation to climb back in until you tumble into it tonight and mess it up once again.
Then sleep sound in the knowledge that tomorrow youâll have the strength to help fix the world just a bit more, because youâll know just where to take your first healing step:
Make your bed.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Canât wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TRâs book, âRevenge of the Sardines,â available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.