Accommodation

I put a solid board under my mattress. 

Actually, I had a solid board under my mattress. But ten years ago, after purchasing my first memory foam mattress, I had to change that board out for slats. Because memory foam mattresses need to breathe on the underside or they will mold rather quickly (ask me how I know). 

For ten years, I wrestled with those slats. Even though they were cut to size, they never seemed to stay in one place, which frustrated me because they were also terribly difficult to move back into place. If I'm struggling with this much intention to move them, how on earth did they keep moving on their own? Additionally, there was no good place to tuck in sheets so that they would stay taut - the slats kept moving, so the sheets kept getting laxer. 

But such was the trade-off for not having mold. 

Then, earlier this year, I bought another new mattress. This time, it's not a memory foam. As it turns out, i didn't like that as much as I thought I would, so I went back to springs. And for the first six or seven months of having my new spring mattress, it increasingly annoyed me that my sheets would not stay tucked. 

Until I remembered...

...I could put a solid board under this. 

It doesn't have to breathe the way that a memory foam does. Actually, it would be much more comfortable on a solid board...which would also provide a great, consistent surface for sheet tucking. 

Now, every time I make my bed (which I just did before sitting to write this post), I think about something deeper. 

See, our lives are full of accommodations that we've made for ourselves. Things we have had to change and create and conger up just to make things work. To make our lives work. To make our bodies function better. To make our relationships function better. To make our work function better. Whatever it is. 

We all have them. They're the little tips and tricks we've found along the way of living that we've figured out make a positive difference in our lives. 

The question is, how often do we ask ourselves if they are still working for us? 

Is that accommodation you made ten years ago still necessary? Do you still function that way? Do you still need to function that way? Do you need something different in this season? 

We build these things into our lives to make thing better, but are things still better? 

Seasons change. Times change. Demands change. We change. Yet for so many of us, our accommodations stay the same. We never reassess them. We never come back and see if we still need them or if we might need something different. 

Then one day, we wake up and the sheets are tangled all around for what feels like the millionth time and all of a sudden, we realize...we don't need that accommodation any more. We can do something new. 

But why are we waiting for the sheets to tangle? Why are we waiting for it to drive us crazy? 

What if we made intentional time in our lives to reevaluate our lives? To reassess what we've built around ourselves? To reassess ourselves? 

Maybe you still need slats. Cool. If that's what this season requires, maybe a few tangles are the trade-off to avoid a bigger mold. 

But maybe you don't need slats any more. And if that's the case, then why are you still wrestling with them?