Proverbial Choice.

As proverbs go, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” might be my least favorite. Especially right now when everyone round these parts is roasting their ass off, even when they're nowhere near a kitchen. Frankly, it's so frickin’ hot here in The Valley these days, that if we went into a sauna it would be to cool down.

As proverbs go, it's as useless as the idiom, “when pigs fly,” meaning something is impossible. Because I don’t mean to burst your bubble here, but Mark’s friend Matthew moved to France with his two pet pigs. And how did they get there? On an actual airplane. So, you see, pigs totally can fly, provided they have the right documentation. And besides, you only have to take a wee sniff into what's been happening politically these past ten years to recognize that anything that supposedly could never ever happen, appears to be happening all the time.

But the worst of them all is the proverbial idiom - check me with my swanky grammar terms - “You've made your bed. Now lie in it.”

Because in terms of advice, what does that even mean? Like how long are you meant to lie in your bed for? A couple of hours? Forever? Surely that's not good for your health. Aside from the fact that all your friends would call you a lazy bastard, like how would you get your laundry done?

And yes, I know, it's some cute way to say you have to live with your choices. But, I mean, do you? Like, all your choices? Because isn't the actual process of learning based on your capacity to change your mind?

I mean, I get it. If you choose to cut your arm off, that's a choice you're going to have to live with. But say you order a burger, and the guy says, “Do you want fries?” and you say yes. You don't have to eat the fries. And you’re not committed to carrying the fries around with you for the rest of your natural life.

So surely the correct Proverbial Idiom should be, “You've made your bed, and you can lie in it. Or you can get off your arse and remake the bed. Your choice.”

I say that, because aiming to be a decent human is an ongoing business. There’s a continual set of challenges, and therefore a corresponding matter of choices. Sometimes you choose the correct direction, and sometimes spectacularly incorrect. But if you make the wrong choice, then take it on the chin and aim to right yourself again. None of us are perfect. We get it right, and we get it wrong. But when we get it wrong, it’s not compulsory to retreat to bed forever as punishment for going a bit awry.

Anyway, the reason I’m mostly thinking about the rubbishness of that proverbial idiom is because this week Mr Tweddle and I bought a new mattress - And yes, I actually did totally just forgo the discussion of profound matters to talk about housewares. Sue me.

You see, about a decade ago (which I am mildly ashamed to admit), we spent a shit ton of money on a brand-new mattress for our bed. The mattress salesman, in the way mattress salesmen do, told us how marvelous it was and pointed out all the swanky features it had, and that it was an investment that would supposedly change our lives. We were a bit flush at the time so we bought it, and I don’t know that it changed our lives particularly, but we slept pretty well. We literally made our bed, so we lay in it. But probably for a bit too long.

You see the thing about mattresses is that over time they deteriorate. Very, very gradually, they get a big saggy and jaggy, and you don’t even notice how bad they’re getting till one day, you turn over, and the thought crosses your mind that a bed of nails might be more comfortable.

That’s where we were at. Of course, both Mark and I tried to ignore it, as we’d spent so much money on the investment mattress we, 1. Didn’t want to spend the same amount of money again, and 2. wanted to get every possible cent out of our ‘investment.’ So we each concluded independently that the problem with the bed was that we were getting old, rather than the mattress.

Finally though, we went away for a couple of days and when we came back home…well, you know that thing when you can’t wait to get to sleep in your own bed?… yeah, it definitely wasn’t that. Looking at our bed with fresh eyes, it was clear that our memory foam mattress had not forgotten us because there were two big indents where we generally lay.

Something had to be done, but I dislike mattress stores more than I dislike bad proverbs, and I dislike splashing out a ridiculous amount of money on something permanently hidden under a sheet even more than that. So then Practical McTweddle pointed out that we could get a new one online for a couple of hundred bucks and even if it only lasted a year or so, it would still be better than our super swanky, old shit one.

And so we did. And now we have. And though outside it’s currently still a couple of degrees hotter than Dante’s Inferno, I have found myself sleeping rather soundly through the night.

So we have re-made our bed. And we are lying on it. And we are both pretty pleased with the way things are. For now. But frankly, when that bed starts to feel a bit rough, we’ll make another bed to lie on.

Because none of us are eternally cursed by the choices we once made. It’s just that when it comes to choices, sometimes it takes a while to work out whether they were the right ones or not. And other times, it’s because it takes a beat or two to recover from a bad one. But mostly, the issue seems to be that it’s too easy to forget that we are allowed to continue making choices at all.

It comes from the French, you know, that proverbial idiom. In the 1500s, you had to stuff your mattress with straw or linens, and if you made a bad job of it, you’d suffer during the night, so they’d say, “As one makes one’s bed, so one finds it” - though they’d say it in French obviously.

They don’t do that anymore; the French. Now they have the same old mattress issues as we have over here. Just as they have roughly the same proverbs. Really, when it comes down to it, people all over the world are pretty much the same.

I expect that’s why Matthew and his pigs were happy to move there. That, and they knew that if it wasn’t the right choice for them, they could just fly somewhere else.

Lynn

Xo

PS: If you can find your way to click the wee heart on this post to say you like it, I would be as cheerful as a mattress salesman is when he sells ‘an investment’

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Proverbial Choice - Audio