I’ve gone back and forth about the utility of making a bed. On one hand, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a more repetitive, Sisyphean task that making the bed each day. It’s true: you just get in it again, and often, it’s messed up long before bedtime happens. The only way to make it unobjectionable is to have it become habit, so that at least you don’t have to devote any active thought to the act.
I’ll admit to you now: if I don’t make my bed, I don’t feel guilty about it, not for a minute. If someone were to see that my bed wasn’t made, I would not be ashamed of that (but, like, why are you in my bedroom?). Awhile ago, I came to the conclusion that making your bed is a small pleasant thing you can do for yourself, to add a bit of order in your life. Leaving your room in the morning with your bed made is what they call in French, bienséant. That word is hard to translate, but basically it means agreeable, or the way something ought to be. It’s also very pleasant to come home to at the end of a long day.
Over the past month or so, I’ve been working on revamping my habits. I decided that one habit was to make the bed each day. And I’ve discovered it goes beyond just being a nice touch. It’s actually a broken window of doom.
Lots of people heard about the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement sociology via Malcolm Gladwell’s book. It’s not his idea, he just used it to illustrate his point. In a nutshell, if you make sure windows are fixed in a neighborhood, crime goes down. It seems that using the windows as a starting point sends a message to erstwhile thugs that the neighborhood is secure and looked after, best look elsewhere to make trouble.
You know I refer to Flylady’s practices some. She says that the bed is the “kitchen sink” of the bedroom. (The allusion to the uninitiated is to the “shine the sink” principle in Flylady. The cardinal rule is the perpetual shining of the kitchen sink. She sees a shiny sink as the springboard to having your whole house and life in order.) So that the bed should be made is important to her, for the symbolic order that having your bed made brings.
The bed can be a literal springboard, too. I happen to like folding my clothes on the bed when they’re clean. The bed is a huge big surface and it’s close to the bedrooms where the clothes live–so I can fold and put away easily. Now, if the bed is not made, it backs up that process. So if I’m ready to do the laundry and I go find my bed still unmade, I’m now taking a step back.
You can see where I’m going with this, and these theories are especially target rich when you’re talking about running a household with more members than just yourself. You have to have little starting places that are almost sacred. Toys picked up. Dishes done. Table cleared, etc. Whatever it is that you’ve determined heads doom off. You won’t be on your own either–over time, household members will see the utility of these habits–even if subconsciously–and start to facilitate things. I want to state categorically, I am not Mr. Clean, cleaning is not my religion, and I do not always make these things happen. But I do think there is value in it, and in fact more value than we in the 21st century are inclined to note down in our spreadsheets.
If I had to have a conversation about bed-making with myself of a few years ago, this is what I’d tell him. Make your bed each day and create world peace.
