Wednesday, April 6, 2022

A New Mantra

I knit during church. 


I realize this may sound sacrilegious, but it truly does help me pay better attention. Of all the voices that clamor in my brain, by far, the most persistent one is the List Maker. 

The List Maker loves to drone on and on about all the things that I have to do today. 

- "What should we make for lunch?"
- "We should just get pizza."
- "We should not get pizza, because we have plenty of food at home and that would be a waste. You just went grocery shopping."
- "Maybe we should go shopping."
- "We should not go shopping because then you'll look at clothes, and we have enough clothes."
- "We should Marie Kondo our clothes."

Ad infinitum
It's like having the love child of Gollum and Martha Stewart constantly whispering in my head. 

Anyway, I knit during church.

Or, at least, I used to. I don't do it so much anymore. Not because the voices in my head are quieter (I wish!), but because I'm finding it a bittersweet experience.

My muscular dystrophy has begun affecting my hands. (There are muscles in my hands also, surprise surprise.) If I knit for any length of time, I won't have the strength in them to play violin or piano for the rest of the day, maybe for the next day as well.

And yet, as I knit stitch after stitch, and feel the distinct pleasure of the soft yarn running through my fingers, it's hard to put it down. The continuity of the thing, the repetition, is soothing. For all the complex designs that can be created through knitting, at its basic element there are only two stitches, knit and purl. They are the binary code of a knitter's program; the quiet, physical rhythm of my psyche. For 18 years, it has been my life's mantra. 

And oh, how it hurts.

I'm not talking about the painful after-affect on my hand muscles; I mean the longing for what was. It's so hard to look at the beautiful skeins of colorful, twisted fibers that lie waiting to be made into something precious, knowing that they will most likely continue to wait forever. That I may never be able to see the finished work that I had envisioned when I first purchased that yarn. 

So now, when I knit, I cherish each stitch in a way that I took for granted before; the smooth feel of the needles expertly sliding into the millimeter of space created from a stitch knitted awhile before, followed by the glow of satisfaction for every successful loop retrieved from a straight line of yarn. There is an incongruity in expecting something as low-friction as a metal needle to be able to snatch strands of fiber, and yet, it can happen.

I'm going to hang onto that hope. Even as I slowly lose something that has been a continuous part of my life for such a long time, I'm going to try to snatch at joy, no matter how incongruous that chance may seem. Just as with a knit stitch, I might occasionally drop the yarn, or it might slip off my needle. But that's the great thing about creating something, right? If I go back and try again, eventually, I'll succeed.

So for now, as long as I can, I'll knit during church, and pray in hope that a new hobby is waiting for me.

The voices in my head agree. (They're also reminding me that I need to go fold laundry.)

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