Making Your Bed

For some reason, a proverb often quoted to me as a child was “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Perhaps I was unusually prone to complaining about the consequences of my own actions.  The proverb goes back to at least the 16th century, and in France was originally “As one makes one’s bed, so one finds it,” which doesn’t rub it in quite as much.

In any case, I have started making our bed every day, something that we had mostly neglected for decades.  Now I would rather find my bed neat and orderly through the day and at bedtime.  When we were driving through Germany, we often saw open windows with the bed clothes over the sill to air.  I don’t go that far, but do fold everything back over the foot of the bed and fluff the pillows when I get up.  After breakfast, I put everything back together.

Making the bed is one task among many to do mindfully that makes a house a home and a life an examined one.  This room is not so much furnished and decorated as built up and arranged from several generations of thought and care. It is simple and easy to care for, but is beautiful and meets our particular needs. Making the bed gives me a time to meditate on the bed, which was my great-grandmother’s, the quilt my grandmother made, the view over the hills, and the new cheery ambiance of the room.

Here’s an interesting site called Sound Czech from Radio Praha which teaches Czech from song lyrics.  This lesson is on “jak si to uděláš, tak to máš” or “how you do it for yourself, that’s the way you have it” – the Czech equivalent.