pace

I’m not usually a real rusher. I don’t speed through things. I’m efficient, I suppose. I work at a pace that allows to me to notice when other people do things really fast or really slow. Take my friend EM, a poet and English instructor extraordinaire. She teaches 180 students, writes seriously good poetry, is in a band that performs regularly in New York, and is about to take her Ph.D. exams. She also writes lovely letters, is in a serious relationship, and makes time for friends and family. She does all of these things because many of them she can do quite quickly. She can bake a batch of cookies—from cracking the eggs to painting the frosting—in less than an hour. She’s quick. I’m not nearly that quick. But I’m also not slow, like another friend who shall remain nameless, and who takes a half an hour to shower and another half an hour to brush her hair. She’s a stunningly good writer, but deliberates over every word, every syllable really, and so things take a long time. J is also what I might call deliberate. He thanks me for my patience occasionally, like at times when he takes an entire day—and uses every dish in the house—to cook a dinner, but often my desire to have something done runs directly into his desire to have something done well.

So when I take on a new project I’m often hyper-aware of my speed and the way that my speed affects the outcome. Recently I was getting nervous that I wasn’t going to have something made for J’s sister’s soon-to-arrive baby [perhaps I should pause here and say that I’m painfully aware that this little blog space has recently been taken over by all things baby. Rest assured that it’s a passing phase – though with not one, not two, but three of my facebook friends announcing the births of their children yesterday alone, I’m not so sure…] and so I abandoned what I had been working on to frantically get this on and off the needles:

It’s the ubiquitous Zimmerman surprise jacket. I made it in worsted cotton in hopes that it would be easy to wash and quick to make. It was certainly quick, but I think that’s because I ramped up my speed out of anxiety. As a result, I didn’t love the process. I was just frantically trying to finish it and now of course, there’s not a baby due in sight for the next two weeks. I could have slowed down, been more deliberate (especially with the seaming), and probably enjoyed it a bunch more. I need to remember that: slow down, enjoy the process, breathe. Slow down, enjoy the process, breathe. Slow down, enjoy the process, breathe. Oh no, I guess knitting has once again become a metaphor for life.