Make your Bed, Change the World

 

A wise man once said: if you want to change the world, start by making your bed in the morning.

At the time, people mocked him for it. They called it ridiculous. Small. Beneath the moment. Some called him a charlatan; surely someone serious about changing the world had bigger things to attend to than making their bed.  What if that wasn't a stupid, small thing to say? What if it was actually one of the truest things anyone has said about how change really happens?

So many of us look out at the world and feel a kind of helpless anger. We watch Gaza. We watch Sudan, Ukraine, the parts of Nigeria where children are being kidnapped from their own communities. We watch poverty tighten its grip even here in the so-called first world. We watch politicians who no longer seem to pretend they care. And something in us goes numb, because the scale of it is so much bigger than we are.

Some of us don't stop at numb. We move past helplessness into action; we join causes, march, start organizations, try to carve out our little corner of the world and make it better. That instinct is good. It's necessary. But somewhere along the way, many of us come to a harder realization:

To change the world, you have to begin with yourself. You have to change your mind. And if you do that consistently, it doesn't stay contained; it spreads outward. It transforms what's around you, and goes even further. 

The Ripple No One Talks About

Picture a man who wakes up angry, already at war with the day. Everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of it: chaos at home, chaos with his coworkers, chaos with strangers who happen to cross his path. And that chaos doesn't stop with him. It lands in the minds of everyone he touches, and from there it spreads again. One bad morning becomes someone else's bad afternoon becomes someone else's bad week. It triples. Quadruples. It ripples.

We like to imagine we're separate, that our inner world is our own private business and nobody else's. But the earth doesn't actually work that way. We are woven into each other. Interconnected and nothing is truly separate. What we leave behind in the people we meet is, in a real sense, the only thing we ever truly leave. And that which we planted multiples in us and spreads in other. A small emotion becomes magnified, growing bigger and bigger until it is stopped by an opposing force. That is the hidden law of reality. The law that we already know, but somehow fail to truly embody

Getting Your Mind Right, On Purpose

So here's the case for making your bed, or rather, for what making your bed represents: get into the consistent habit of waking up on the right side of it. Every morning, before the world gets its hands on you, sit in the stillness. In the dark, if that's where you find it. Get in touch with how you actually feel. Get in touch with whatever is beyond all of it;  call it God, the Creator, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Source, whatever name fits the shape of your belief. Get your mind right first. Then walk out into the world from that place, not toward it.

Your mindset isn't a footnote to the work of changing the world. It is the work.

Look for whatever in you champions unity, love, and oneness, because that, and only that, is what actually moves the needle. Not one grand gesture, but millions of people waking up, most mornings, a little more aligned with something greater than their own reflex reactions. Setting down the need to feel special or superior. Choosing instead to simply abide with ourselves, and with each other,  and to remember that we were never really separate to begin with.

Where I come from, we have a word for this: Ubuntu. I am because we are.

Get in touch with that. Every morning. 

A life is made of days. Lets make every day a happy day for all!