2026-01-01-inventory (labor)

I love making my bed. Even if that has not always been the case, I do not remember a time that I didn’t like making my bed. I recently learned that someone wrote a book about making your bed. I was at a bookstore a few weeks before Christmas, looking for gifts, and walking past the self-help section, I saw the title Make Your Bed. Turns out Admiral William H. McRaven and I have this in common.

I like the way it feels to pull out the twisted sheets and quilt and align them again with the right angles of the bed. I like fluffing the sheet, the ripples of air ironing out the wrinkles. I like squaring the corners like wrapping a present, then placing the pillows, like putting a bow on top. I am sure the Admiral can tell you why this is good for you, but I’ve not read his book, and I’m not sure I will. I know why I like to make the bed and don’t plan on quitting the habit any time soon.

I also love sweeping. When I lived in China, I used to watch street sweepers working in the early morning while I was out running. They had their carts, their straw brooms, their oversized dustpans. They never looked hurried. Maybe that is a sign of labor. Not because the work won’t return—it will—but because rushing does not make it better. A street can be swept carefully, even knowing it will gather dust again. There is time to finish one stretch before moving on to the next.

When sweeping happens indoors, I use a dustpan. The rubble of indoor living is swept into the pan and deposited into a trash can with satisfaction. Sweeping outdoors can be satisfying too, though more difficult. The surfaces are uneven, grittier, grippier. In most cases, no dustpan is involved. Sweeping ushers unwanted debris across an arbitrary boundary between human-occupied space and what lies beyond. Nothing more. It is a brief détente.

As much as I love sweeping streets and floors, I hate sweeping inboxes. I have tried to think about why this might be. A room has a certain square footage, but so does my cloud storage, only measured in bytes. It could be about cadence. When I think about my inbox, I imagine living in a place where dust is always blowing in. In my mind, I am transported to a desert. My home is made of sand, and the sand blows all day long, nestling into piles in the corners of my rooms and coating every surface. If this were the house I lived in, I don’t think I would like sweeping.

After sweeping a floor, there is a respite from the accumulation—brief, but long enough to enjoy. I can sit in a chair and notice the floor. The way the light falls across it. The absence of grit underfoot. The floor does not refill itself while I am looking at it. It allows the small satisfaction of completion. My inbox offers no such pause. As soon as I flush an email into the trash or send it back, another one lands. There is no surface that bears the evidence of having been tended. It only waits, already filling again.

I like labor that prepares. For instance, if I know I will move my body the next day, I like to get my clothes ready in advance. I think about the weather, who I am likely to encounter, and choose what to wear accordingly. The clothes mark an intention. They hold a place in the day for something that has not yet happened. I like preparing syllabi for the same reason. Setting intentions and initial coordinates. They are provisional. Still, it helps to know where you think you’re going on the way to where you are actually going. The syllabus is both a work itself and a labor.

Some labor is meant to prevent other labor. Going to the dentist is like this. I never want to go, so I make the appointment six months in advance. By the time the day arrives, there is no decision left to make. It is already on my calendar. I show up and submit to the dentist’s chair. I put on the sunglasses they give you to dim the glare. I dig my nails into the back of my hand to tolerate the drilling noises. I feel the grit of the fluoride treatment while I check out, scheduling the next appointment six months into the future.

There is some labor I am not equipped to do. Annually, I hire someone to inspect our furnace. It usually takes several tries. In recent years, they surface from the basement to ask for the wifi password. After they connect, they go back down, verify proper functioning equipment, resurface to tell me all’s well, and send the invoice.

There is some labor that only I can do. My son is in middle school, and about every other week, I am midwife to the birth of some unsought insight, wrought from the mouths of middle schoolers. This labor does not make me special. I am the one to do it simply because I am there. Often the insight arrives awkwardly, half-formed, or late in the evening. It does not arrive on a schedule, and it does not stay fixed. What matters most is not the insight itself, but the fact that someone is present to receive it, to hold it briefly, and to let it pass without trying to improve it or rush it along. This labor leaves no surface cleaned, no system reset. There is nothing to admire afterward, nothing to mark completion. Still, it is work that must be done, again and again, as long as someone is growing and someone else is close enough to notice. Much of labor, I am learning, looks like this—quiet, repetitive, and unnamed, happening whether or not anyone thinks to call it that.