What purpose does a nightstand fill?
I put socks, boxers, shirts, gloves and pajamas inside my nightstand. I thought that was where they belonged and I never stopped to think why I assumed that was their place. I was just following what my parents and their parents did. Of course I put them in the nightstand! — I uttered with the steadfastness of someone holding an inviolable fact about reality, when a roommate asked me, with a mix of surprise and amusement, why I had put those things in a nightstand. His question didn’t feel like a blasphemy, I was perfectly fine if other people decided to store their underwear somewhere else. Still, the question begged an answer, and I didn’t have it. I didn’t have a clear answer for him, and also for myself. Not even a half-hearted reply.
Rationally, things on/inside the nightstand should be stuff that you would like to have at hand when you are in bed. Why would you need underwear or pajamas easily accessible? Do I sleep naked or need to change while in bed, before getting out of it? No, I don’t, just to confirm. And why do I need gloves? Am I sleeping through a Texas’ power outage? In the end, I couldn’t give an answer. Perhaps, after pondering a while, I could have come up with some semblance of an explanation, but even now I am not sure I have a good one. People that put underwear inside the nightstand might have indeed changed clothes when waking up. Maybe they couldn’t afford a lot of furniture, and so used a nightstand as a drawer.
Why had I never questioned myself about this? Sure, it is easy to dismiss it as something minor, but it still led me to think about what other things I take for granted. Do I need some external stimulus — a friend, for example — to break the certainty in the reality I have built?
Behind all my uncertainty about my motivation lurked the puzzling question: why had I never questioned myself about this? Sure, it was easy to dismiss it as something minor, but it still led me to think about what other things I take for granted. Do I need some external stimulus — a friend, as in this case — to break my belief in the reality I have built? Or do I have the resolution to tinker with it? This time it was something irrelevant, but what if it is something that shakes the foundations of what I think is right and real? Will I have the clear mindedness to see through the fallibility of my tenets? To see them being pushed to the test, worn out and possibly crumble due to something else I wasn’t expecting? The biggest concern that crosses my mind is the chance that I might miss these moments and I just keep moving on, unabashed, into the abyss. That I don’t stop a while to reconsider a specific part of my reality, losing the opportunity to correct my course. And early corrections are always easier than delayed ones, and infinitely better than those never done.
Maybe the nightstand was thought for people that slept bare naked. What were my grandparents doing?
