In this world of the internet, things happen quickly.
We have 90-second reels that show house renovations going from derelict to beautifully complete in a blink of an eye. A two-year project squeezed into a minute and a half. And we don’t see the brush strokes, the waiting for deliveries, or the endless trips to the DIY centre to get those little small things that make the world of difference but are never shown.
Something taking time, something slow, something that involves the same motion over and over again doesn’t exist in this internet world. Click a button and those hours and hours, days and days, months and months, years and years happen in seconds.
And in some ways, you do get to a time in your life when everything seems to have whizzed by.
The idea of sitting down and doing something for an hour without the end in sight is starting to feel alien to us. Yet doom scrolling is something we can easily do for an hour.
The feeling from doing something like knitting, a jigsaw, cooking, baking, taking a walk… is amazing and calming.
While the feeling after doom scrolling is either empty, or the self-critic comes out and says, why don’t I have x, y or z.
So this blog post is about the slow and the same. I am knitting the Philippa Jumper. Like I did last month. And like I will do this month. The same stitches. The same yarn.
At the end of a busy day, where I have sat at the computer doing all the admin needed to make sure the Skipton studio runs smoothly, I’m like a duck… calm on the surface, but paddling away underneath!
And so those same stitches, and that same yarn, after one of those days, are so welcome. It’s how I calm my mind and relax my shoulders. I don’t have to think about what I am doing. And those repetitive motions relax.
It’s the slow magic of knitting.
I notice the difference when I don’t knit in an evening, but it’s something I can’t quite put into words. Like love. It’s there… but how do you ever completely explain the love for someone or something to someone else?
You just hope that they feel that feeling too.
As they say… IYKYK.
And maybe that’s what knitting is. Not just something we make. But something we feel. So if everything feels a bit fast at the moment, or a bit overwhelming, maybe the answer isn’t to do more. Maybe it’s to do something slower. One stitch at a time.