Every day is a new beginning

Happy New Year!  This first full week of 2020 is looking pretty good! Inventory done and everything ship shape and organized.  The shop's even been rearranged for the new year.  It looks good--I think you'll like it.  While I hate doing inventory, I'm always glad to have done inventory.  In fact, I almost wish it came more than once a year, just so I could get this feeling of everything being all tidy and in order.  It makes me think about a conversation I had with my wonderful nephew, Misha, on New Year's Eve.  I asked if he had any big plans for 2020 and he said, "I think we need not a formal, date specific reason to execute or commence long term work or life enhancing resolutions..." 

Such a poetic way to say, that every day, even every minute, is an opportunity for a fresh start.  I love that.  We do tend to put off positive changes or productive endeavors until some arbitrary date.  While making a fresh start is nice at the beginning of a new year, it's every bit as valuable at the beginning of a new month, or a new week.  Heck, every single day is an opportunity to make a fresh start. 

Sometimes a successful fresh starts begin with a clear understanding of why things were messed up before.  We can say, yes, tomorrow I'm going to do better, but without  knowing what exactly we need to do differently, we're likely to continue along our established path, and end up frustrated. 

It certainly works that way with knitting.  If we wrap the yarn the wrong way and are twisting our stitches , doing it more won't fix things.  In fact, it will more deeply ingrain the incorrect movement into our  muscle memory. As my daughter's violin teacher used to say, "Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent."

With other things, doing better is simply a matter of repetition.  For example, if we're a new knitter, sometimes our stitches are sloppy, but the more we knit, the better we get.  and in this case, practice absolutely makes perfect. 

It's especially nice that knitting gives us tangible proof of our improvement and our increasing skill.  That fabric on our needles is right there, and we can see how the stitches have become more even.  There are fewer holes or inadvertent increases. That's pretty satisfying, I think ‑unlike those things we might resolve to change that aren't so easily measured or validated. I don't mean that we shouldn't strive for positive growth and change, I simply mean that our positive progress isn't always as satisfying as we might like it to be.  But knitting‑knitting is always satisfying.   

I look forward to seeing you in the shop and around the table.  You are always welcome here.

~Ellen

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