We don’t normally re-post these self-helpy memes, but…
This.
When you’re tempted to mentally pre-script a work conversation, or imagine advantageous stage directions for an important first date, or envision yourself forcing SUCCESS! into those first scattered, shaky moments at the podium, maybe lean on this instead:
“When that moment comes, I will stay open and present. I will let Love be through me. I will listen inside, and I will be a listener with actual ears.
I don’t need to know how this will work ahead of time, which means I can safely get back to not burning the hotdog buns under the broiler, Now.”
I was putting on my mascara, and found myself thinking about the walk I was going to take as soon as I was done.
Me to myself: “Rick said he would come, although it’s cold and windy, he’s already walked for an hour, and he’s sitting happily playing “Wordscapes” in our cozy living room.”
“I’m just as happy to go by myself. That might be nice, in fact. Would I wear my wireless headphones and listen to Eckhart Tolle on Audible?”
“No, probably not. Tolle would just tell me to be present in the moment, to be where I am, now, and then I’d feel stupid for not just being in my walk.”
And then I poked myself in the eye with my mascara brush.
We’d been chatting about those cardboard pinhole thingies we both remembered making in school so you didn’t fry your retinas by staring directly at the sun during an eclipse.
It hadn’t crossed either of our radar screens that we should have made a plan this time to buy some eclipse-safe glasses, so we decided to just head down to the beach and experience what we could in the changing light. This basically involved getting too hot while the sun was still fully visible, schlepping up to the house to change into tank tops and shorts, then feeling chilled as the sun gradually slipped behind the moon.
As once-in-a-lifetime experiences go, it was proving somewhat underwhelming.
That is, until Inspiration slapped Rick upside the head.
“Hey, look what happens when you make a basketweave shadow with your hands!” In a blink, Rick is trotting up the stairs towards the house, leaving me on the beach with my iPhone, miffed with myself that I hadn’t figured out earlier that a 90% total eclipse at 10:00 a.m. during low tide was going to offer a photographic “golden hour” from an angle I had never seen before, and never will again. My inner photographer was seriously vexed with my outer adult worker-bee who had failed to anticipate such a stupendous opportunity, so I punished myself by shooting mundane seaweed clumps…
… and the patina of abandoned oyster shells that glowed with a notably unique softness I hadn’t noticed on our beach before.
A twilight filter cast on things only normally recognizable (to me) in the bright eastern light began to shift the mood… … which took another hard left turn as Rick jogged back onto the beach loaded with a hand full of perforated kitchen utensils. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what a 90% eclipse looks like as seen through the lens of our new spatula, set against the fabric of our black beach chair. The slotted soup skimmer came in a close second.
And that was that.
Valuing our eyesight above the experience of actually seeing the eclipse with our own eyes, we settled in to absorbing the event with our bodies (minus eyeballs) and hearts.
I started playing with my iPhone camera again.
It wasn’t until this afternoon, when I started casually flipping through the shots I had taken, that I realized my camera had been recording WAY more than I knew.
This is the shot that brought it home.
What was that mysterious blue crescent that presented itself?
I zoomed in for a closer look and realized that not only had we been graced with proof of wonders we could not see with our own eyes in the moment… … but that this is true on all kinds of levels, if only I had the eyes to see. I started going through all the photos I shot this morning, and the signs were everywhere.
The evidence of amazingness is all around us, even as we struggle to see things in the most ordinary of ways. God, give us eyes to see… … and hearts that remain soft enough to be filled with wonder and gratitude.
You might think the photo above is a pair of fancy hand warmers I finished knitting yesterday.
In fact, there are at least two additional ghost hand warmers in the photo. This is because, apparently, I’m an inattentive and easily confused knitter. I made a LOT of mistakes which resulted in much ripping out and do-overs, so I probably actually knit the equivalent of two whole pairs.
Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean that all the failures and frustrations and exhilarating learning moments aren’t there. They’re there. They’re woven directly back into the modest degree of success I achieved.
This is how it works in my life, too.
Lesson Two: It’s not necessary to fix every mistake.
This project involved at least four skills I had never tried before: magic loop knitting, cabling, creating a thumb gusset, and crafting a twisted rib stitch. (I’m probably forgetting one or two, but those four were the ones that uncorked the most colorful language.)
I had to train my fingers and hands to move in unfamiliar ways while trying to maintain a consistent tension on the yarn as it flowed through my fingers. At the same time, my linguistic processor was burning rubber, trying to learn this new language that would help me figure out what the pattern was telling me to do next. All this was against a landscape of inconsistently interlocking loops that was just beginning to make sense to my eyes.
Suffice it to say, mistakes were made [passive voice intentional].
Most of them demanded repair, like the several times I messed up on which direction the crossover on the cabling went, or when I forgot to move the yarn over top of the needle before switching direction on the magic loop and ended up with extra stitches (sort of) on the needles.
But many of my errors were simply because my fingers aren’t yet proficient at following the new neural pathways I am trying to build. I’m just learning. My fingers didn’t understand what “maintain proper tension when changing needles using the magic loop method” meant.
I’m like a little kid in knitting kindergarten, so I colored out of the lines sometimes.
In these cases I let my inner knitting kindegartener celebrate by embracing the tantalizing messiness of what it is to learn something brand new.
In the case above, it was just a flat out mistake that I could have fixed but noticed late in the game and decided, “Meh… It’s on the inside of the cuff. I can live with it.” I let my inner lazy adult make the call on that one.
And I learned that it’s often okay to live with small mistakes that no one else cares about or would even notice.
Lesson Three: Practice makes perfect, or at least good enough.
And it is very sweet when you figure something out that was impossible until suddenly it wasn’t.
Lessons Four and Five:
Don’t believe everything I read, and, I get what I pay for.
The pattern was wrong.
Let me repeat that in case you didn’t catch it the first time: THE FRIGGIN’ PATTERN WAS WRONG.
The instructions for the right hand were different than for the left, so I dove in with confidence that the people who publish knitting patterns have actually made the item under discussion according to the pattern they’re offering.
Nope.
I tried twice up to a point well beyond where the thumb started, and both times, it became clear that I was creating a second left hand, albeit starting from a different door in. It was still, very decidedly, a left hand version emerging. And I still couldn’t believe it could be the pattern, and not me.
Called the store, left a message: “Could someone please let me know if I’m doing this wrong?” No response.
So, I ripped it out (again) to the cuff and knit the mirror image of the left glove on the theory that a) it might work, and b) if it didn’t, I was getting a LOT of knitting practice in for the amount of money I spent on the yarn.
It worked, and I learned that sometimes the directions actually are wrong, and that there often is a positive correlation between how much you pay for something and what the actual value of that thing is.
The pattern was free.
Lesson Six: Knit my problems.
I tried meditating, but all I could think of was my knitting.
But that’s okay, because evidently, knitting has benefits that are also found in meditation: calm, rhythmic mindlessness, with a very quiet yet lightly focused point–literally–of attention. There’s even a yoga-ish word for it: “knitasana.”
And knitasana is delightful. It somehow realigns, cools, and calms screaming neurons that have been burning way too hot for way too long and need a breather. When I knit, I find myself taking deep breaths without meaning to.
And this is all just terrific until I screw up, or life screws up around me, or in any case, my knitting becomes fecked.
Just like life: sailing along at a lovely quiet rhythm of sleeping, taking long walks, working at stuff you enjoy, cooking dinner and eating it with your best friend, and then… whammo! A stitch has been dropped or one row grew where I wasn’t expecting it and I don’t know why, but now I need to fix it. I move rapidly from reflective zen zone to alert problem solving.
The surprise here for me is that, if I let it, my “problem” becomes a moment to closely examine where I’ve been lately, and what I’ve done that lead to my current situation. It’s a creative process, really, a puzzle to solve, and one that leaves me a far more well-informed knitter than I was when everything was sliding along nicely like butter.
Just like life. Substitute “person” for “knitter” in the paragraph above and noodle on it for a bit.
P.S. Got back from a walk a few minutes ago with my new gloves on, and not one of the dogs we met objected to that little mistake on the inside cuff, or even seemed to notice.
