Title: such is the question from my cousin in last night's email, and the string of answers, none of them inclusive, leads me about by the nose today. I'm going to jot and peck away at answers.
How much that TAM looks like a clock-face.
Knowing my cousin and/or knowing my own powers of projection onto my cousin, I sense aggressiveness and accusation; and since I'm quite out of touch with my cousin, I'll absorb and erase her aggressiveness and take it into my own super-ego: why do you knit so much? Don't you have better things to do (or as my mother answered when someone asked her if she knit: "Only if I can't find a book or a piano or anything else to do").
Some people would not even consider wanting or needing to "justify" why they spend their "time" knitting. Lucky ole them.
I've got a family history so encasing, boxes of duty, professionalism, purpose, community values, and other "shoulds," that I like to poke holes (with needles?) into it, to breathe with more room.
Every week I assure (someone/self) that I've done my work, been accountable for all my responsibilities; that the rest of the "time" is mine.
Two questions perhaps: why is time something I might be stealing? Why knitting ? (instead of writing? gardening? other things more or less purposive?)
The "form" that "content" takes is knitting these last sixteen months. The "content" is desire, delight, pleasure, self-soothing, experimentation, amazement, amusement, solitude, space to mull.
Then there's that pesky bit about the cost of knitting--but now I get to teach knitting and gain store/yarn credit in repayment, so money, that horrible necessity, almost gets ex-ed out as a concern.
Where do I get the time? What else have we but time? I'm sixty-two, my children are launched, my profession secure and oh-so-well-known, so lovely and so manageable. I'm in the world's luxurious position of being able to CHOOSE for many of my hours. This year I choose knitting.
And am drolly entranced that knitting chose me. My daughter-in-law reminds me that when I started knitting--on the beach of a family vacation in August 2006, with two wondrous new-knitting cousins ("what fun to share this vacation craft with Ellin and Chris!"), a way to parse the "time," to visit, to focus our sandy moments together)--I insisted somewhat dismissively that this was "just a vacation" interlude....
A month and eighteen hats and six scarves and the originary felted bag later, I was knotted in the knitting life.
How to mark time? Thirty-six sweaters is what kind of measure or equivalence for sixteen months? Tams, scarves, slippers, socks, mittens, xmas stockings? instead of days, weeks, hours?
--There is no clock when I'm knitting (or in the Forest of Arden). I live much in a world of marked time, to knit is to enjoy a different world.
--I knit to find out why I knit.
"Dog, you want to go out? Let me finish this row--aka, just a minute"
My only reluctance to drive 4 hours to see my granddaughters? That's a goodly part of a sleeve I can't be knitting.
I teach film studies, but haven't gone to an out-of-school movie since July (because I can't well knit in the total darkness). So, I have all that previous-movie-going "time."
A lot of chitter-chatter about time and knitting. But I'm going to continue it another "time," as it's interesting and somehow important to me, but now I must knit.
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