Unraveled Wednesday: 3/13/24

I'm happy to join Kat and fellow Unravelers with what I hope is a nearly completed Hydrophily. 

What you see above is the first stripe of the last gradient color (on the far right-hand side), and there are four more stripes to go. When I say "nearly completed", I still have 61 long rows left but I really hope I can finish this week and get it into a nice bath for blocking. While it's blocking, my plan is to wind my new yarn for my Hitch on the Move and get that cast on. 

John is the cause of my Hydrophily slowdown. He's had some cervical neck issues that have required multiple doctor visits, an mri, a cat scan when he had an anxiety attack in the mri, and chauffering to physical therapy. 

These things just haven't been conducive to sitting and knitting like I'd rather be doing, but fingers crossed he can resolve this without surgery. We'll see, but that's all the more reason to have a Hitch on the Move cast on and maybe a backup Hitchhiker for waiting room knitting. 

I did finish several books this week. Now that winter is ending, light is returning, and the daffodils are almost ready to bloom, I thought it was time to finally finish Winter Solstice. My outlook is a bit different in March than it was in the depths of January, but MacLaughlin provides us with a wonderful meditation on all aspects of the winter season.

“Winter tells us, more than petaled spring, or hot-grassed summer, or fall with its yellow leaves, that we are mortal. In the frankness of its cold, in the mystery of its deep-blue dark, the place in us that knows of death is tickled, focused, stoked."

 

I found this to be true and especially agreed with the author when she wrote about our urges to honor the dark with festivals of light. I liked thinking about the universality of the experience, even if the winter solstice occurs at different times of the year for those of us in opposite hemispheres. This is a book I'll reread next winter and I look forward to MacLaughlin's Summer Solstice. 

As soon as I finished Leaving two weeks ago I looked for more of Roxana Robinson's writing. She wrote Sweetwater 21 years ago and I think her writing was much less developed than it was in Leaving. Sweetwater is the story of Isabel, her life with her husband Michael and his mental health, their struggles with fertility, Michael's death, and her subsequent unsatisfactory life with her second husband Paul. It's told in non-chronologic order which caused me some confusion, but it's also a very bleak story. There was an event that happened so quickly without explanation that I had to go back and re-read to make sure I hadn't missed something. Much of the novel takes place in the Adirondacks and these sections helped me to round this 2.5-star book up to 3 stars. This book felt shallow yet filled with despair, and I would recommend Robinson's more mature writing in Leaving over Sweetwater.

I thought that Languishing was a book that had been pretty much written for me once I read the summary, so I was a bit surprised to find that it was just average after reading it. Corey Keyes first does a decent job defining the terms he is talking about. Languishing is an “absence of wellbeing that millions of people were experiencing but found hard to put into words” during the Covid-19 pandemic. He explains that this state of mind involves a lack of excitement, community disconnection, and “the constant feeling of unease that you’re missing something that will make your life feel complete.” Languishing is not depression or sadness, but Keyes does say it is the opposite of flourishing.

The author then goes on to discuss the daily practices he feels are necessary to move from languishing to flourishing: Learn Something New, Build Trusting Relationships, Move Closer to the Infinite, Find Your Purpose, and Play. Do any of these sound familiar? I haven't read a lot of self-help, but I think that these things have been mentioned in almost every self-help book available. I can't argue with any of them; they are so obvious as to almost be common sense.

While I respect Mr. Keyes' research in flourishing/languishing, some of his action plans seemed a bit vague to me and I'm afraid they would also feel overly forced. I think that the pandemic was an obvious time for so many people to feel as if they were languishing; before vaccines, we needed to be mired in a state of languishing to feel safe. But I also think that languishing has been a "normal" state for me after times of great change such as having children, the kids leaving home when they are grown, changing jobs, or or retiring from work. I view it as a time where I've paused and asked myself "What's next?". It's not just a stop on the way to flourishing or happiness, but using periodic languishing can be a way toward finding contentment. I think this subject and pertinent information could have been better presented as an article or TED talk.

What are you making and reading this week?