Do you make your bed?

[EagerMind]

What constitutes a waste of time?

 

I've only made my bed a couple of times in my life (mostly when I was younger) because I always thought it was a waste of time (I'm kinda lazy too). You're going to mess it up sooner or later only to remake again, ect... So why do it? Is it to show that you're responsible to your parents when you're young or maybe to help you along with the rest of the social standards of your environment. Either way I see no point and wonder why it's done!

 

The time wasted making your bed everyday adds up and probably could of been used for something more useful!

 

**edit**

now that I think about it I probably should have posted this in the off-topic section, sorry!

Edited May 17, 2008 by EagerMind

[shontonga]

What constitutes a waste of time?

 

I've only made my bed a couple of times in my life (mostly when I was younger) because I always thought it was a waste of time (I'm kinda lazy too). You're going to mess it up sooner or later only to remake again, ect... So why do it? Is it to show that you're responsible to your parents when you're young or maybe to help you along with the rest of the social standards of your environment. Either way I see no point and wonder why it's done!

 

The time wasted making your bed everyday adds up and probably could of been used for something more useful!

 

**edit**

now that I think about it I probably should have posted this in the off-topic section, sorry!

 

Don't mess it up then it's easy to make!

Yes. i make my bed

but it just means i fold the blankets back up to the pillow!

looks neat.

always have ... don't like wrinkles !!!

Only in people!

Not in sheets!

 

 

Shon

[dirtypunk]

I always make the bed. Every morning after I get out of it.

 

The reason why? I want to make the world a better place but I can't do it if my personal life is in shambles. Making the bed and taking care of the everyday things I have to do are the first steps in improving the world we live in.

[de_paradise]

Bed making is mainly self-delusion. Delusion you can put some order in this world symbolically, delusion that you "like" the symmetrical nature of flat rectangular items in your box of living space--its unconcious programming. There is something to be said about the efficiency of orderliness if we were on a navy boat, but we are not. So I think its more efficient to let it be.

[Yoda]

With a fluffy bed cover you can just give it a quick flick and it looks good... best of both worlds!

[thelerner]

Yes, I do. As a kid I rebelled against it. But with just a blanket it takes about 25 seconds.

 

I'm far from it, but a certain amount of zen neatness outside, reflects a clear mind inside.

 

I'm a believer in Initial Conditions, how a project starts has a great deal to do with the end result. Starting the day by putting one small easy thing in order.

 

 

yada yada, looking around my desk is a mess, with layers of papers like an archaelogical site.

 

Michael

[rain]

Edited May 17, 2008 by rain

[Taomeow]

Do you wash your bowl?

[Taiji Bum]

I make my bed. I had to make it growing up, then in the Army I had to make it again.....ugh... hospital corners. After that went through a few years of not making it and also growing my hair but now I am back to making it. Although thats all I do since I have a housekeeper. For some reason I hate it when she touches my bed.

[Taomeow]

I make my bed. I had to make it growing up, then in the Army I had to make it again.....ugh... hospital corners. After that went through a few years of not making it and also growing my hair but now I am back to making it. Although thats all I do since I have a housekeeper. For some reason I hate it when she touches my bed.

 

You are quite sensitive -- you want someone to touch your bed only if you want that person to touch YOU. We spend one third of our lives there -- more than we remain put in any other one place in a solid unbroken chunk of time -- and the bed becomes "configured" to your imprint, not just physical imprint of your body but a kind of presence of your being that is uniquely your own. In a sense, your bed becomes an extension of you, you are connected to it in all manner of subtle ways even when you're not in it --

 

and that's why in feng shui, they recommend not only making your bed but making sure that it is made just so as to announce, loud and clear, "awake!" The bed that is unmade announces, subtly but to some levels of you also loudly and clearly, "still sleeping." If you don't make your bed, you never wake up properly and your waking hours are not really waking hours -- an unmade bed blurs the distinction between awake and asleep for those levels of you that are in subtle contact with it.

[Yoda]

My inner bed... dig it!

 

There is something to it... we have a megabed that can hold an infinite number of people and there's a place on it that is "mine" and does have a connection to me during the day.

 

We just moved the TV out of the bedroom and it's a huge improvement!!!

[松永道]

Dirty Secrets

 

Don't listen to the bed-making gestapo!

 

There's nothing natural about rectangles and flat sheets. Expose those beautiful rolling folds of your rumpled quilt to the light of day! Should your bed reflect your person, be like the hills, ravines, and valleys. This is a landscape that breaths. Texture and dimension.

 

Who should want to fashion themselves as a flat, bacteria haven?

 

(By the way, I believe in "zen neatness", dusting, putting things in their places. But there's nothing zen about strict tidiness. The world's scariest people are neat-freaks.)

Edited May 18, 2008 by 松永道

[Taomeow]

My inner bed... dig it!

 

There is something to it... we have a megabed that can hold an infinite number of people and there's a place on it that is "mine" and does have a connection to me during the day.

 

We just moved the TV out of the bedroom and it's a huge improvement!!!

There was a Simpsons episode where Homer was very upset when someone else sat on his sofa in front of the TV and "destroyed his ass groove."

 

In nature, one thing ends and another one begins -- the day ends, the night begins -- every day and every night it is like that. Tao makes her bed every morning even though she will have to unfold it again in the evening: she removes the moon, the stars, the dew, the darkness and there's no trace of them anywhere till their time comes again. Imagine a lazy tao who wouldn't clean up after whatever she does -- all the rains going on forever once they start, one on top of the other, all the heat and cold, all the snow and sunshine, all the yin and yang... I don't know what all those nondualists who believe all differences and margins are wrong are smoking, really. It's the ultimate nightmare to imagine a world where things don't know how to begin and end, how to express and separate their essences from one another, where all you ever get is "more of the same." When this happens to a habitat, it's called "loss of biodiversity," and such a habitat keeps devolving toward lifeless desert. When it happens to our cells, the medical term is "de-differentiation" -- loss of distinct differences -- and the diagnosis, "cancer."

 

Why would things be different in a world of "as above, so below" on the level of our ideation, lifestyle, politics, or bedrooms?.. Of course you will feel better without the TV in your bedroom -- it's like recovering from the flu, removing a splinter, beating off an alien invasion, restoring the principles of "separation of powers" in a democracy, or of "separation of state and church," and so on...

[rain]

Dirty Secrets

 

Don't listen to the bed-making gestapo!

 

There's nothing natural about rectangles and flat sheets. Expose those beautiful rolling folds of your rumpled quilt to the light of day! Should your bed reflect your person, be like the hills, ravines, and valleys. This is a landscape that breaths. Texture and dimension.

 

Who should want to fashion themselves as a flat, bacteria haven?

 

(By the way, I believe in "zen neatness", dusting, putting things in their places. But there's nothing zen about strict tidiness. The world's scariest people are neat-freaks.)

 

 

bed spread. spread over the bed. bed makeup. no need to overdo things, to cover them up. right.

Edited May 18, 2008 by rain

[Patrick Brown]

The bedroom and specifically the bed have a ritualistic aspect which is kinda archetypal and is obviously related to sex! A clean and tidy bed is a statement about the importance and meaningfulness of the ritual of sex/making love/fucking or whatever you wish to call it. I remember an ex lover who always went to great efforts to make the bed, and bedroom, very tidy and sexy needless to say I appreciated it very much!

 

Yes I make my bed, I pull my duvet up and brush it smooth and flat.

[Taiji Bum]

Is a bed obviously related to sex if you're a celebate? I agree its arch-typical to intimate relationships and ritualistic but I think its deeper than sex. I dont just make my bed but if I go camping I leave campsites cleaner than I found them. I think making your bed is microcosm of how you treat people and the world.

[rain]

Is a bed obviously related to sex if you're a celebate? I agree its arch-typical to intimate relationships and ritualistic but I think its deeper than sex. I dont just make my bed but if I go camping I leave campsites cleaner than I found them. I think making your bed is microcosm of how you treat people and the world.

 

I do soo agree.

 

What is shared and between. Is what is in the bed and everywhere else? no? dogs and whores, campers, saints and martyrs alike.

Edited May 18, 2008 by rain

[Patrick Brown]

Perhaps it has something to do with tranquillity and peace? Because I'm a Tao Bum I've spent most of my life in bedsits (single rented rooms), although I'm lucky enough to have a whole house at the moment, and the bed has always defined my space. Even now I find laying on my bed, even in the middle of the day, very peaceful and relaxing.

 

I've never been sure whether celibate people are sexual or not as the definition is rather vague.

[freeform]

Fantastic topic!

 

Personally I don't have any strict procedure... Sometimes I make it sometimes not... sometimes I even make it before going to sleep in it!

 

Whatever meaning our minds associate with it, is not really real - so why not play with it? especially if you're used to consistently doing one and not the other...

 

a dog's bed is wherever it does 3 or four turns and lies down

[Fire Dragon]

[rain]

Edited May 18, 2008 by rain

[Fire Dragon]

[Taomeow]

By the way, I think a bedspread is responsible for my taoist connection. When I was five years old, I got a silk Chinese bedspread for my bed, bright-gold-colored, with two huge dragons hugging its borders. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and the biggest challenge I had ever encountered till then. I struggled with those dragons every day because I was instructed that I was big enough to make my bed myself, and I definitely wasn't (my parents always thought I was big enough for anything, at any age, which is why to this day I don't know how to feel helpless -- whatever the size of the problem, my inner scale tells me I'm big enough to handle it). I think it took me ten years to learn how to make those two dragons fly out of my hands in one elegant silky whoosh and land on the bed to rest and shine through the day. I wonder what happened to them, my first taoist teachers...

[Sahaj Nath]

a curious thread.

 

 

 

i've always kept a messy bed, a messy house, a messy mind, and a messy life.

 

until recently, that is.

 

now i keep my environment neat religiously. and i do it for a very simple reason.

 

 

because everything counts.

 

 

i never rush. i breath slow, move gracefully, and handle everything with care as if everything were tender and in need of care. it's a good way to start the day and end the night. it's a good way to be.

 

 

 

for years i believed domestic chores to be tedious and a waste of time. but i found that wasn't the reason i was messy- it was just the belief i constructed after the fact. slowly going about the ritual of daily chores has the ability to put you right here, right now, radically present, without some approved structure labeled "spiritual" to distract you from what's at hand. because everything is spiritual. everything counts.

 

there is discomfort to be found when we submit ourselves to even the most basic daily tasks. it's that discomfort that most people are avoiding. for me at time it could be so overwhelming that i could hardly sit still, *unless, of course, i could convince myself i was doing something important, like meditating.*

 

now i make very little distinction between cleaning my house and practicing my forms. i make very little distinction between my healing work and my friendships. i endeavor to bring integrity and quality to all tasks. to all relationships. and i no longer run from my own shadows as i once did.

 

everything counts.

[Taomeow]

Very well put, Hundun. I went through a similar evolution -- from "naturally messy" which I justified to myself by assorted beliefs that made it OK or even "superior" to being otherwise -- e.g. that I was, ahem, unconventional, creative, artistic, not like those poor neat freaks who have nothing better to do with their lives --

 

from this, to a realization of the "as above, so below" truth, of the fact that a disorder outside is always an expression/extension of a disorganized mind, spirit, and eventually body, and, invariably, life --

 

to a long and fruitful battle against myself and my own messy ways --

 

to the new feeling of freedom that you can't experience unless you have slain the beasts of entropy with your own hands. Victorious, I observe my shiny pots and pans, my neatly folded towels, my labeled and filed paperwork. This is not a work of obsession, of following someone else's enforced "rules," of "nothing better to do." This is spiritual work, hard and challenging and tangibly rewarding.

 

There's relapses. I get busy with something "more important" and in no time my old adversary, His Majesty Entropy, rules again. I notice that I start feeling defeated "in general" whenever he manages to usurp the territory I'd been fighting so hard to call my own. Where he rules, I have to obey him, not any higher authority. I don't know where things are, I waste my time looking for stuff, I get stressed out over things not taken care of in time that had grown unnecessarily complicated as a result, and so on. This robs me of the convenience and the peace of mind that only come to an environment where I call the shots. So I start the spiritual battle again when this happens. Maybe I will never win "for good," taoist sources I've seen assert that gods don't like perfection in humans and will invariably punish the arrogant perfectionist -- because, well, only gods are supposed to be perfect, and they see a mere mortal aiming for perfection in anything as challenging them. Yet I am convinced the Way is anything but messy, and will keep striving to emulate its ways.

Edited May 19, 2008 by Taomeow