Make Your Bed Anew

Nelson Shake

Only one thing can you say for certain—you think. Your life has been series after series of disappointed expectations, and that has been your life’s education. How to face yet another unfulfilled dream or potential and adjust accordingly. And when you are young, it is awful, brutal. You have no way of knowing how you could ever recover. The mental energy it takes to imagine such a thing is too much. Because the house you’ve made your bed in has seemingly collapsed, the air inside all sucked out. Picking up the broken glass of it all is pointless since you know there is no possible way to reconstruct what you had before the moment your hopes were unmet. And that becomes all you can think about, how irrevocable it all is. You spend every waking moment fixated on it, and those waking moments are more numerous than usual, by the way, because sleep doesn’t come easy.

Then one day, without any sort of explanation, you come to realize that you’re okay. More than that, you begin to understand that you’ve actually been okay for a while now, but it must have been so slow in happening that you couldn’t notice it taking place. In fact, you begin to suspect that while you were still bemoaning your bad luck, you were probably already on your way to healing. Lo and behold, you’ve made your bed in these new circumstances, the world of past—and now slightly less alive—disappointments.

Of course, that’s not the only time it happens. Other expectations—some different, some similar—also go by without ever attaining some kind of actuality. And so there you are again—livid, anguished, even paranoid. However, just as subtly and just as unnoticeable is the way that it takes less time, ever so slightly less time, to make your bed again in this new home. And if you’re honest with yourself, it’s not even that it’s a new home. It’s still the same place as always, the one you’ve been in from the start with, granted, visible differences. A broken window taped over. Trim that needs paint. A grease stain on a kitchen wall that only gets deeper and deeper. A wobbly bed frame. But it’s still yours and recognizable as yours and even more familiar than it was before—precisely because you can point to the dilapidation and say, Yes, that’s mine.

You don’t realize it at the time, but that’s a big step: Staking one’s claim. You don’t see it as staking your claim, not for the longest time you don’t, because you always tended to think of such an action as a prideful, triumphant sort of endeavor. Conquest and all that mountaintop sort of thinking. It takes you years—decades, really—to learn that acknowledging your place in the valley, however momentary or long, and deciding to make your home there, too, is a place of incredible strength. To be clear, you don’t know that or think it in the moments where you are living in the valley. It’s only after the fact, well removed from it, that you begin to understand it really wasn’t that bad.

You immediately distrust this revisionism. Wasn’t it terrible at the time? You keep yourself from uttering phrases like, If I could go back and do it all over again, I would, because you’re deeply skeptical of those kinds of sentiments. You know that if you were to go back and restart, you’d still make the same questionable choices and react in the same hurt manner when your panoply of expectations happens to be, yet again, left to rot. No, those days are not worth doing all over again. Some things you don’t want to re-witness. Some beds are too hard to remake.

But enough time has passed to the point that you understand you are now occupying what many would refer to as the twilight of your life. While some attribute wisdom to people at this stage, you’re not so sure such a mantle should be placed across your shoulders. If given an examination assessing what you have learned up till now, you’re not even sure what the correct answers would be. Instead, you come back to the certainty that all you have learned is to prepare for disappointment to occur, to know that it will come, that the hurt it causes will not be permanent, that it is even good and right and true to say in those moments, without any hint of falsehood or pretension, that everything really is fine, fine enough for you to make your bed anew in whatever place you find yourself.

So why is it, then, that as you come to finally grasp the certainty of this hard-won lesson, you find yourself utterly afraid to die? You’ve come to understand that, across all time and space, you will encounter again and again the impermanence of things, including—maybe even especially—the expectations that are realized. Everything gets away eventually. This you know. And it is at this moment you see for the first time that what you should have been learning—and what you aren’t sure you’ll ever be able to fully commit to accepting—is that every unmet hope, dream, and desire has been there to help you, yourself, learn how to pass away.