Process and Patience

In the yarn world, it is said, there are two types of knitters – product knitters and process knitters. Product knitters want to have something to show for all their effort – a finished scarf, a sweater, a pair of mittens or socks. Process knitters are all about the effort itself. For them, having a finished piece is nice, but the act of knitting is where they get the most enjoyment.

I am definitely a process knitter. I do finish pieces. Eventually. But the repetitive motion of right needle in stitch on left needle, wrap yarn around right needle, left needle up and over right needle is some of the best meditation I’ve found. My brain can far more easily wander around, stretch, drain the gludge and solve problems while knitting than it can if I try sitting zazen and focusing on my breath. Whatever works, eh?

And I’m one of those weird knitters that doesn’t mind huge sections of a single stitch pattern. My current project is largely stockinette stitch, and I easily get into the stitching groove while listening to an audiobook or a CD or “watching” a movie (I listen to movies more than I watch them these days, and have you seen Interstate 60? I saw it recently and loved it, and I can’t remember the last time I could say that about a movie.)

I’m also a process writer. Same deal. I finish writing projects, sooner or later, but constructing the plot lines, character sketches, and scene lists, as well as writing the scenes themselves in the layering process I use, and the noodling and nudging and swapping and revising is what keeps me doing it.

No surprise then that I’m fast turning into a process cellist. Even when I first started lessons last June, I had no illusions about being able to play the Elgar Cello Concerto in a week. (Someday, maybe…) I actually looked forward to starting from the beginning and slowly learning bit by bit to see (and hear) what might happen. The fact that I will likely spend the rest of my life learning to play this instrument and never learn it all is not daunting to me.

Learning to play the cello has reminded me, just as knitting and writing remind me, that I have patience. There are a few things with which I am impatient, but for whatever reason, creative endeavors make me think I have all the time in the world, or maybe time slows down for them. I will happily sit with a Schroeder book (which is Emily's fault because she turned me on to them) and play a couple of exercises over and over as the structure and pattern of them comes into focus, and I giggle at how cleverly it was written out to do just that.

Well, at least I think it's clever.