So… the winter has arrived

Today the thermometer pointed out 1^o Celsius outside. So, the winter has arrived. For many months I had wondered how it was going to be when this moment arrived: Will I be able to run in the park? Will I need to do what I hate and join the gym? Will I be forced to stop my routine of exercises that does me so good?

I stood looking through the window... the London grey sky finally showed up. No sun, nothing blue... just grey. No one at the street. Where is everybody? Just I planed to go out? I stood there for some minutes, gaining courage to go. I finally texted my boyfriend... I needed to share the angst. He told me not to go, after all, I was still recovering from a cold. But I needed to.

What I didn’t tell my boyfriend was that by doing so I was sending a message to my body: “it will be cold outside, might not be confortable, we might have to come back earlier, but we are still going... we won’t lock ourselves inside this apartment”. I wanted to tell my body that it has been suffering with this new weather, but it’s not alone. Mind and body are together in that… and when the body chickens out, the mind comes to encourage. It was something so small, but an attitude that meant so much.

Two layers of clothes, thermal top and pants, ear protector, gloves, iPod… and there I went. I warmed up inside my apartment and left home already running. For the first time I was one of those people that wait for the traffic light jumping at the same spot. I arrived at the park. There I was… facing it, feeling it. I could feel the cold passing through my gloves… but I could handle it. The wind challenged my jumper, but at least it was real. There was some cold smoke coming out of my mouth, I could finally see it. My feet were still warm, and I pushed the ground to go further. I was running… I was there… I was facing it… I could nearly touch my fear… and put it inside my pocket. And then my body told my mind: “We made it”.

Knitting

Back from my vacation, here I am…

Sometime ago I told you about how I was “talking to food” (please, read the post below before calling me crazy). Well now, inspired by my friend Luiza, I have engaged in something else. I started doing some knitting. Someone might think that this is the result of a huge amount of spare time. That’s not really the case. In my busy routine, I have been struggling to fit in some knitting time. The reason for that I have already mentioned... to make, instead of thinking, turns me into a better person. And I have learned some interesting things trough this new hobby.

I was always a really cautious person. As everyone else, I didn’t have everything under my control, but I enjoyed doing my best for it. Things could go wrong, but I was always sure to have done my best to get them right. So I planned, I reviewed, I worked, and reviewed (tiring, I know). And I would always imagine what could go wrong, so I could anticipate the solution in case that something did go wrong. Why to lose time with mistakes?

While knitting on the other day, I got one point wrong. And knitting has something that may be annoying: you just find out your mistakes once you have been insisting on them. So, as I was still not sure if the point was really wrong, I had to keep going, despite my dissatisfaction about insisting in a work that I wasn’t sure that was right. Well, it wasn’t “right”. I wasn’t what I had planned. Turned out that in the middle of my pattern, I created a new point and my knitting was becoming larger. What had the form of a perfect rectangle became closer to a triangle. But suddenly, trough this “mistake”, I could figure out how the knitting works... how we can enlarge or reduce the width of the fabric... suddenly I discovered a new path. Suddenly I realised how I could, for example, do a turtleneck.

It’s so obvious now... but how many times was I afraid to make mistakes in life.  I always thought that when people said they wanted to “learn with their mistakes” it meant that once they got it wrong, they would always know how to get it “right”. And this is nice, but if we can plan and avoid mistakes, why to lose time with them? But what I really got out of my knitting was that learning through my mistakes might not mean that from now on I will get it all right. Instead, from my mistakes I might get it different... I might see something better, worst, but new. Something not foreseen. Something unpredictable. Something surprising. Suddenly, to plan so much seems not just tiring but boring. I want to let life surprise myself…

Happy 2012.

my future scarf...