Have You Made Your Bed?

The Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson has become known for his injunction to people to make their beds.  It has become a sort of tagline for him. Yet why this obsession with a tedious chore that must be done in the morning only to be undone in the evening and so repeated day after day after day?

Doubtless every mother trying to convince her children to tidy their rooms and make their beds would appreciate his support.  Naturally those inclined toward cleanliness and order would applaud his sentiment.  But why should he force this perspective on the rest of the world?

One obvious answer is that he is merely a conscientious person who likes order and believes that everyone else ought to as well.  After all, we all like everyone else to believe in the importance of what we feel is important.  We could thereby dismiss his statement as merely a means of trying to control his environment in a more extensive fashion than most people would consider by having his influence extend even to people's bedrooms.

Yet if you listen in context, he also says to get one's house in order before trying to change the world.  So really he wants clean houses, right?

No.  There is far more at stake here.

It's about far more than merely the completion of a daily chore or a clean environment.  It's about a conscientious approach to life and the element of sacrifice.  In some sense, too, it really is about the inanity of the action.

For one who neglects to make his bed because he will unmake it again in the evening has a perspective that one ought not to do something that seems fruitless.  But what if that seemingly-fruitless action were essential?  I can think of so many areas in which this might be relevant from cleaning a jet engine or building a rocket to writing computer code or designing software.  Would the one who wouldn't make his bed choose to do anything unnecessary?

Might he not rather neglect little things that could have serious ramifications?  Even death, for instance.

"He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in that which is greater: and he that is unjust in that which is little, is unjust also in that which is greater." (Luke 16:10)