Yesterday, I cleared my bed.
That probably doesn’t sound significant. People clear their beds every day. But for me, it felt different. Because I like to write and create, I usually keep things close to me. My laptop may be at the foot of my bed, along with a notebook, journal or pen. Those things are there intentionally. I may get an idea and want to write it down, open my computer or work on something without having to go very far.
But over the past few months, other things have started collecting there too. The case with my prescriptions. The packaging from the pharmacy. Mail. Socks. Clothes I’d worn earlier. Nothing outrageous and nothing that prevented me from sleeping comfortably. I sleep on one side of the bed, and everything had its own little spot on the other side or toward the bottom. Sometimes I’d even make a cute little pile. 😂 It was organized enough—or at least that’s what I told myself.
Yesterday, September 20, for some reason, I wanted it gone. I don’t know where the energy came from. I didn’t make some grand declaration that I was getting my life together. I didn’t start a cleaning challenge or decide that September 20 would become some symbolic day of transformation. I just felt the need to clear my bed.
So I did. I hung up the clothes and put things where they actually belonged. I moved my medicine to the table where I want to keep it, which also means that when it’s time to take it in the morning, I actually have to get up to get it. The laptop moved. The journals moved. The mail moved. My phone stayed because that’s my alarm, and I like sleeping with Gospel music playing. But everything else was put away.
And this morning, when I woke up, I noticed something.
My sightline was clear.
I’ve had this thing about sightlines for several years now. Depending on where I’m sitting in a room, I want to be able to look out and see clear space. When something starts cluttering that view, eventually something in me says, Wait a minute. I need to clear this. Maybe that’s what happened yesterday.
When I opened my eyes this morning, I didn’t see the little pile at the foot of my bed. I saw my comforter. That’s it. And it felt good. What makes this interesting to me is that none of those things had actually been in my way. They weren’t preventing me from getting into bed. They weren’t taking up the space where I sleep. They weren’t keeping me from writing, resting or listening to music.
But maybe something doesn’t have to be in your way to affect what you see.
I’ve been thinking about that. There are things we become accustomed to seeing simply because they’ve been there for a while. We stop questioning their presence. We work around them. We make a pile. We straighten the pile. We might even make the pile cute. 😂 Eventually, we don’t really notice it anymore because we’ve learned how to live with it.
Until we see the space without it.
And maybe that’s what felt different this morning. It wasn’t that I suddenly had more room in my bed. Technically, I didn’t need more room. It was that when I opened my eyes, there was nothing competing for my attention. There wasn’t anything waiting for me to put it away, deal with it, organize it or decide what to do with it. There was simply clear space.
I don’t know that I need to make clearing my bed mean anything more than what it meant yesterday. I don’t know if this was some profound moment about clearing my life, preparing for something new or making room for what’s next. Maybe I’ll understand it differently later. For now, I simply know that something in me wanted a clear bed, so I listened.
And I’m glad I did.
Maybe sometimes clarity isn’t about having all the answers. Maybe it isn’t even about making some huge change. Sometimes it may be as simple as noticing what has been sitting in your sightline for so long that you’ve stopped seeing it—and deciding that it doesn’t need to be there anymore.
This morning, for the first time in a while, I woke up and saw nothing at the foot of my bed except my comforter.
I liked what I could see.
It felt good to be clear.
