Slowed Paces

Sometimes I think that I love knitting so much because it slows my whole world down.

Face it.  We all live varying level of a rat race.  We are tied immutably to the clock and its relentless drive to get to 12 and 12 again.  We wake in the morning when it tells us too. We have lunch as it hits the lunch hour.  We eat dinner when it is dinner time.  Our life is a seemingly endless round of getting there on time.

It strikes me as a little sad.  We have invented every sort of labour saving, time saving device we could imagine in our search to give ease to our lives, yet all we seem to have created is busy.  In our desire to make our lives easy, we have taken out every moment of the day where we might have pondered the great and the small.  We have left ourselves with lives so full of busy that there isn't anytime to stop and think.  

Knitting is my slow time  Taking that needle and placing it through the loop, gathering a strand of yarn, and pulling it through:  that small action, that small set of movements with very simple tools is measured in a way that I can comprehend, perhaps in a way that I can control and manage in a world where everything else is off kilter.  

This week with its forced  slightly slower than usual knitting pace has reminded me of these things.  And in reminding me of these things, in taking out a whole class of what I could be knitting on, magically, logically, I am getting a whole lot more knitting done, and I am feeling even better about being a knitter in the modern world.