Thursday, December 8, 2011

Being grateful isn't just for Thanksgiving

Oh gratitude, that most elusive of human emotions: this one is for you.

My kids will tell you that I can out grinch the Grinch himself. And I can. But I've hit the time of year when I can no longer fail to appreciate the Grinch's miserly heart growing three sizes.

Among many things for which I am grateful, I am immensely grateful that I can hand knit at all. Those of you who are non-knitters and non-yarnies may fail to appreciate the why of it.  Why I at times forget to appreciate it at all, is an absolute mystery to me.

Almost 13 years ago, on 21 December 1998, I had a stroke that rendered me virtually senseless for a very long time, and among many other things, I lost all use of my right hand for 6 months, and have not regained fine motor control of my right hand to this day. Honestly it's unlikely that I ever will. My adaptation was to accept that my right hand was virtually useless.

 I haven't buttoned my blouse with both hands for 13 years.  I haven't typed with two hands in 13 years. There are many, many things I haven't done with two hands in 13 years.

Back in 1998 I was an insane crocheter, a craft requiring the use of fine motor control of both hands. Then BLAM!, that was gone in an instant.  No more crocheted baby clothes, baby blankets. No more crocheted toys or doilies. I missed playing with yarn and thread more than mere words can express. And this loss of a much beloved hobby stayed with me, when I've gotten used to the other losses from the stroke.

Then I discovered machine knitting in 2008, which I could do with my left hand and at most one thumb  from my right hand. Yes, that bad boy works a wee bit now. And I could play with yarn again, which felt like a miracle.

Then in February 2011 over a weekend, I learned I could knit by hand in the English method in a very non-standard way. There are no words to express the ecstasy that came with that discovery. I could finally work with yarn using both hands!

Though I can only physically feel it in my left hand, knitting was and continues to be an incredible emotional experience. I can now reason (reasoning took me a long time to recover) my way through how to accommodate most knitting stitches. And if you watch any knitting videos on YouTube, you'll see what an accomplishment that really is for me without the use of the fingers on my right hand.

There are some things knitted that are impractical for me to do without having the use of the fingers of my right hand. I'm hesitant to say impossible because I'm still learning and figuring things out, though I'm sure there are things I physically can't do. I am a much slower knitter than most, and impossibly slow compared to expert knitters. But I knit all the same, and the quality of my work is impressive. Adapt, improvise, overcome.

Rehab after my stroke taught me the usefulness of the military motto "adapt, improvise, overcome." Relearning how to do the things most take for granted, walking, talking, thinking, reading, dressing all in a new way teaches you that there's not much you can't do with a workaround. You just have to look. However, some things just don't seem to have a workaround. In part, adapting means accepting your limitations.

Accepting limitations is highly useful, but there's a large but. Sometimes that acceptance blinds you to what really can happen through improvisation, and it kills the gratitude. Until February 2011 I'd not realized just how far this motto could take me. By improvising past my adaptation, I learned to overcome.

And I am grateful. So if you hear me relate things to knitting, now you know why. It's gotten so much better since 1998 and 2008. Never, ever let go of the gratitude. It is what keeps you adapting, improvising, and overcoming. Hold on to that.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Get a new hobby, this one is scary

Having recently taken up knitting, I've learned a few things concerning my erstwhile hobby.  It's twisting my brain into contorted positions a yogi could never achieve, even over the course of several lifetimes.

For me knitting is not just a hobby, but a meditative technique that frees my mind to think about well, whatever crosses it.  Most people react to my flights of mental fancy with a polite "get another hobby." That's the only polite thing they can say about how my brain works.

Those two seemingly innocuous stitches, knit and purl, once mastered exert a pull on the psyche only matched in nature by a black hole. The comparison is apt: Knitting is the black hole, and mastery of of those two stitches the event horizon. Once you cross there is no escape. Nevertheless, once inside, you discover a multiplicity of new universes. 

My previous universe was knitting a baby sweater. A kind and comfortable place. My current universe is sock knitting. In practice a sock is just a bent tube that is closed on one end. In my mind it became anything but.

In knitting, I embraced elementary school math by adjusting my gauge because I can't match the gauge of a pattern to save my life. For the average knitter gauge adjustment can feel as intimidating as making the leap from counting to calculus.  At times, just the thought of it is enough to make your eyes roll back into your head and induce a seizure. 

4th grade math was never as important as it is when you realize the gauge swatch you just knit for your sock means said sock would fit a full grown yeti. It only takes ignoring gauge once and knitting one yeti-sized sock before cracking open your child's math text to relearn calculating ratios so that the suckers will fit a real person. Once applied and happily knitting away, that gauge conversion ratio frees my mind for thought exploration.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

In this way the sock universe becomes Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

At a minimum, a knitted sock could probably best be described mathematically as a non linear function that would turn most mathematician's bowels to water. It sure does that to mine. Remember, I just re-embraced  4th grade math?  The series of twists traversed by a single strand of sock yarn worked toe up are mathematically more impressive than the age of the universe. And my mind begins to wander...

The function gently spirals up in size in size from a line of stitches into a cylindrical ovoid encompassing the instep. To become the heel, the function traverses a plane of stitched short rows worked back and forth. It them continues back into cylindrical form, and is ribbed before the function reaches its endpoint.  I wonder what that equation looks like??? Really? Really. Resistance is futile.

As I work steadily away on my sock, observing my work in progress brings me to the brink of mathematics, with the question "why does my sock look like THIS?" The easy answer is that it isn't finished yet. However, knitting a sock from the toe up generates shapes reminiscent of the most incomprehensible of topological transformations.  What n-fold torus can this sock form, hmmm? 

How does a mathematician really see a donut in a coffee cup? The same way I see a finished sock in a ball of yarn, that's how. I don't think Riemann had socks in mind as he worked, but that something as simple as knitting a sock can bring topological transformations to mind says a great deal about the power of both math and knitting. 

Maybe mathematicians could answer the big questions about the universe investigating socks... 

And all of this came from calculating a gauge conversion. No wonder it scares knitters.

 I'm often told "get another hobby." Now you can see why. Resistance is futile.