A note from Jane

Unmade beds remind me of my failed marriage. For the eight years I lived with my first husband, neither of us would make the bed—ever—maybe because we weren’t trained to do it as children.

But seeing that unmade bed every day bothered me a little, and then increasingly as time wore on. It seemed like a sign that we had never quite grown up.

So the first morning that I woke up in my own place, by myself, I made the bed. And I have been doing so ever since. I have often thought about why.

In an Alan Watts lecture, he talks about how we sometimes treat as serious those things that aren’t serious at all, like doing the dishes. He says, “The whole point of washing the dishes is playful. You don’t wash the dishes for a serious reason. You like the table to look nice. You don’t want to serve up the dishes with dinner with all the leavings of breakfast still lying on them. So why do you want the table to look nice? Well, again, it’s the nice, you see. You like the pattern on it that way.”

There’s no question I sought a new or nicer pattern. But also by making the bed look nice, maybe I would feel better, or become someone who hadn’t failed. I treated the issue as serious.

In my recent client work, I find writers sometimes describe characters using the universal and abstract language of emotion, without referring to how those emotions manifest in specific behavior. To make a more indelible mark on the reader, consider revealing even the smallest actions that bubble to the surface—like the decision to start making the bed.

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