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...