Happiness is a Freshly Made Bed

photo from decorpad.com via Pinterest

I once read a list of things that all "happy" people have in common - it might have been one of those annoying "Top 10 Things Happy People Do" or "How to Be Happy" articles in Cosmo or Better Homes and Gardens - and one of the items has stayed with me every day since.  It was so easy, it was comical. I think I even snorted in derision as I read it:

Make your bed.

"Make your bed," I imagine myself saying at the time.  I probably even put the magazine down and took a good gander at my bedroom, strewn with with children's toys and dirty clothes and likely a few spit-up stains on the comforter and pillow cases.  I might have even kicked the magazine aside and thought, "Right.  Like that will change my life."


But you know what?  I took a leap of faith - maybe not that day or the next or even the next week - and when I thought of that idea again, I simply pulled the top comforter up the the headboard and fluffed the pillows a little.  "Done," I said to myself.  Satisfied, I walked out of the room. 


And then I did it again, the next day.  Then the next. And so on.  Only, it made me start clearing a path from the bed to the closet, from the closet to the bathroom, to the staircase, down the stairs, through the living room, and into my life. 


I cleared shit out.  We moved.  I didn't take that old baggage with us.


And every day, I begin again, with a freshly made bed.

Pack-Out Day

Moving Day April 2010 from Erin Shachory on Vimeo.

So, I look a little more like the crypt keeper than I'd like, but I took this video in the midst of our "pack-out" day (a little military jargon for this former military brat). This is sort of our "PCS" (permanent change of station) and is so much like what I remember from my childhood: packing up your "household" items (furniture and clothes and toys and things that you can live without for a month or so while it's in transit) a month before you move into your new home; in a week, we'll move our "temporary" stuff (the things we cannot live without during that month). It's all very exciting and weird.

And, to boot, it's sort of breezy today, so the wind has been howling through the house all day. Ushering in the new, I suppose!