In his book Make Your Bed, Admiral William McRaven talks about how doing this one seemingly simple thing every day helps with so many other things in your life. Making your bed makes you less likely to crawl back into it, it gives you a sense of accomplishment and starts your day off on the right foot even if everything else goes wrong. This is now a habit that I try to practice every day.
Recently, I changed rooms. My bedroom now is simply my bedroom. A stark contrast from also being a home to my work desk, my virtual counseling office, and a literal cat sanctuary (where my cats hide from my dogs). And now, instead of my bed being set on the floor to prevent cats from making a mess under the bed, and shoved against the wall to make room for everything my room needed to be, my bed rests neatly along one wall with room on either side. I was surprised at how easy making my bed is in my new room and how much more cathartic and relaxing making my bed has become. Instead of an arduous chore, it has become an easy morning routine.
I don't think I realized just how much I did not look forward to making my bed before, or all of the extra steps that were involved. It was just normal life to me. TO walk you through just this step in my morning...I had to pull up the corner of the mattress and tuck the sheet in just right to avoid it slipping off later, sometimes failing to do so and ending up on a bare mattress by the end of the night. I would need to pull my mattress out a bit and toss the comforter and sheets just so in order to get them across the bed and then plop on and straighten them out from the open side of the bed.
The result was still the same, in the end, I still had a great start to my day and I accomplished at least one task. But the process to get to that point was much different from the now just straightening out my comforter and fluffing my pillows.
This is how life works when we have unhealed wounds of any kind. The deeper and more severe the wound, the more there is to overcome in doing everyday tasks. Like making the bed, what should be a simple process becomes an arduous task riddled with obstacles. We probably don't even realize how these wounds are affecting us, because this is normal life for us. But we can find ourselves comparing our lives to others and wonder how they seem to be having less of a hard time.
But when we commit to doing the horribly awful, often painful, but so worth it, process of true healing - our life becomes much more like the bed in my new room. There aren't so many obstacles in the way of getting things done. If you find it difficult to get basic life things done in the way that others seem to be able to, it may be that you have healing still left to do.
God bless and have a wonderful week!
Susanne & Elyssa
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