I haven't knitted in forever. Life just keeps getting in my way. But then a fickle friend pulled me back into the knitting world, and I figured it was ok as long as I limited myself to only one kind of knitting, so I picked socks.
And, since I've done a whole one pair of socks in my life, making me a master of the old ways, I decided to work on a whole new way of making socks... with 2 circular needles and magically weird heel turns.
So I started on the first practice sock. 17 times. I cast on 2 24 inch needles for this leetle sock and they got all tangled up and confused, so eventually I went down to one needle for a while until I had to go to 2, and it was generally a big old life lesson, wrapped up in a miniscule sock. My daughter asked why I was still working on this doomed socklet and I told her eventually I would finish it.
And so I did! I have one leetle sock! I am so looking forward to making an adult-sized pair of socks! I looked ahead in the book and realized that the socks I most want to make are the toe-up socks, which means I have to make another leetle sock, and I'm not sure I'm up for that yet. So perhaps I'll pick a leg-down pair to make first. Because focusing all of my knitting energy on socks means I have, um, a *lot* of sock yarn. And some fancy Addis I'm just itching to use.
I swear I meant to write this post a month ago, and in a horrible burst of irony never managed to find the time to do so, but here it is anyhow. I think I should warn everyone that my only degree is in Philosophy, and I've managed to shove that part of me down for a while, but apparently navel-gazing is the new black and so I'm dusting off my old philosophical thoughts and letting them out to play.
My friends were all reading A New Earth, and since I wanted to find out what the fuss was about I instructed my Kindle to fetch it for me and set to reading it. After reading it, I had a few thoughts...
First, I'm very pleased that Oprah is encouraging people to read and discuss things like this. These topics are important in our lives and by and large we just don't make the space for them. Along with that I am highly amused that Tolle chose to cast Jesus as the ultimate Taoist. Don't get me wrong, the bible is all filled with examples of what a zen individual Jesus was, but the churches in our world today tend to shy away from this kind of thought.
My main impression of the book is that it's a nice melding of Taoist and existentialist philosophies, which I tend to like because those are two of my favorites. And reading it reminded me that I need to consciously take the time to remember the things that are important to me. Letting things go that don't serve me is something that regularly escapes my priority list, and my internal list says this is more important than anything else.
I did come to a realization after reading the book (although it was ideas I'd processed before). I spend way too much of my time feeling guilty that I can't do all the things I want to do. I have my priorities - my family, my work, my friends. And so many other things seem cool and wonderful, and I keep wanting to engage with new groups of people doing new things, that when I can't find the space I feel sad... which is silly. The reason I can't find space for new things is that my life is filled with wonderful friends and family, and a fabulous job. I'm not willing to give up any of my current things to have new things, and that's perfectly reasonable.
Oh yeah, one other thing. One of my priorities has always been my health (even though I let it slip in importance sometimes) and to that end I'm doing the Danskin Triathlon at Disneyland this year - I've even talked some of my friends into joining me, and I'm really excited about it. I even made a website for our training and encouraging. So I guess that makes it family, friends, work and health. Oh, and singing! I've decided that's important too, and I'm going to sign up for a class. But that's it! Nothing else! If only I didn't live in such an amazing town, I wouldn't have to make these terribly difficult choices.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets periodically overwhelmed by the number of things I'm not doing right. I still shampoo my hair, my kids watch TV and play video games and despite my best efforts we still seem to end up with transfats and other evil plastic foods in my house. Every time I turn around, there's something new to feel guilty about, and the packrat research monster inside of me insists that I need to dive deeply into every single topic to determine the truthfulness of the claim, which just increases my anxiety about my worth as a human being, while not actually giving me space in my head to contemplate anything of actual worth.
I have spent many an hour railing against the mean and nasty high bandwidth world, providing so much chaos and so few answers... but in a moment of clarity, I discovered that these gifts brought to me by the intertubes, clamoring for my attention, are not actually the main source of my anxiety. My anxiety comes from having too many things bouncing around in my brain like colored balls in a Busy Ball Popper. And I have found something that actually helps.
I read Getting Things Done a while back, and it kinda was ok, and seemed like a pretty good idea, but I wasn't really sold. Then a few weeks ago I was pointed to OmniFocus, a GTD tracker for the Mac, and I discovered that if you wrap up a good set of ideas in a cute and sexy UI I will actually use it. And when I spend my time actually doing things instead of scrambling to remember which next thing I was supposed to be doing, things get done faster, and I am calmer. I sort of feel like I'm playing that game from ST:NG where they had the little brain game that gave you zaps of happiness whenever you make a goal. I check a box, it gets a line through it, and I feel a little swell of pride. It integrates pretty nicely with my iphone (courtesy of Toodledoo) and it allows you to see all your 'errands' or 'phone things' in a list separate from the project they're associated with. Which is great when you're trying to get all those lame phone calls out of the way at once.
I'm not sure if I'm really any closer to zen mastery, but I sure feel happier. Even though I've been battling the most rotten cold ever this week, I've gotten a lot done for home and work, and I don't feel like the world is sitting on my shoulders, waiting to collapse. And now I can check off the item marked "Make blog post about OmniFocus." Woo. That felt good. Maybe I should call and schedule that dentist appointment next.
