In my twenties, I took up knitting because I found it intriguing and I liked the idea of learning a skill that could be put to practical use. Very quickly when becoming a knitter one is disabused of that story, that knitting is practical. That is to say—it’s a skill that creates useful objects, through which one can make clothes, rags, even nets if needed. But it is also quite laborious, and one quickly understands why the temptation to simply buy a machine knit sweater outstrips the pleasures of making one.
Often yarn will come in these beautifully wrapped skeins, very attractive on the retail shelves, but quickly impractical when it comes to use. Very quickly I discovered that the skeins would become tangled up if I didn’t make the effort to unwind them and then rewind them into tight balls of yarn that would release only what I needed to work.
What I’ve learned about myself is I have a great deal of impatience for tedious labor that requires diligence and attention. This is one reason why I didn’t stay in my first effort of a career as a proofreader, which requires such work. Unwinding, untangling, and rewinding a skein of yarn is another such work. There are machines that will do it for you, but if one has already created a mess of tangles and knots then those will not help. Similarly, if one has begun a yarn project and needs to start over—which unfortunately happens a lot to me—there can be similar moments of needing to stop when knots become too gnarly.
Rushing through a untangling only makes it worse. New knots get wound around old knots. Strange places get stuck and one spends so much time simply trying to trace the blockage to its source before you even get to the effort of massaging it apart so it can be unbound. Yet to reject this process only makes future work harder. There were times I simply tried to knit as long as I could without unwinding and rewinding the skein, and then I’d get to blocked places where I’d have to thread an entire project through a knot.
Untangling is a work of attention, diligence, and love. One could simply cut away all the knotted and gnarled patches, and at times one must, but that is a loss of beautiful yarn and the possibilities of that one undivided thread. If one wants to preserve the threads, one must untangle.
In working with the Self, with relationships, with communities, there are times when our stuckness comes from not taking this time to untangle: When there is a giant fight or a grudge we don’t understand, and we want to push forward, only to find ourselves even more stuck. When we want to make a big change and we feel this urge to do it now, and we don’t take the time to research, talk to the important stakeholders in the change, and then find them binding us.
Untangling is slow work that makes future work easier. When a client comes into therapy, for example, wanting a specific change in their life, they may be frustrated. The change seems so simple but they can’t seem to make it happen. Every step of progress generates some setback.
Instead of focusing on the whole knot, and getting overwhelmed, we are served well by picking a thread and following its path through the knot. This thread could be how masculinity informs the problem. The thread could be how the economic situation informs the problem. The thread could be how their relationship with their mother informs the problem.
We long to find the one single thread that untangles the whole, but humans are too tangled and intertwined for that. Yet as we follow each individual thread, truly seeing its journey and its path, we create a little more space and looseness in the knot. Thread by thread, we begin to separate out what can be separated, to see how each interacts with the other. We make little changes. We learn to go for a walk instead of sending an angry email. We learn how to calm the body under stress. We learn how to say no and yes in the ways that serve us.
So much misunderstanding and tension arises when try to simplify this process and only look at one thread, only apply one lens to the entirety of our knotted challenges. It’s all a neurological problem. It’s all about what my parents did. It’s all their fault. It’s all my fault.
Untangling slows us down and frustrates us because it feels like nothing is happening. We are well served to remember the finger trap, that puzzle that only grows tighter the more we pull and struggle. It’s in relaxing and coming together that things unbind and we find freedom.
Patience is a practice we bring to difficult and complex situations that cannot be easily resolved. Many of the problems in our lives will not be solved before we die. Rushing to fix may entangle us more. Giving up and doing nothing leaves us entangled, despondent, and without aliveness. Patience is a practice of doing the work in front of us with as much attention and diligence as we can bear.
Eventually we find, when we’ve moved through the frustration and despair, a calm pleasure in doing and being of service. And we may find we’ve unknotted enough to have useful material with which we can make something new.
