If you’re the kind of person who notices these kinds of things, you’ll have noticed that there was no written post last week. Last week, I had some things come up unexpectedly that needed taken care of immediately. Namely, several people I am close to had, within days of each other, very different varieties of very real, very emotional, life-altering crisis. It was hard to watch them go through what they were dealing with; I made sure I was there, and I did my best.
I also did what I always do when faced with such things dealt out by life – I took all that emotion and re-directed it into a super-focused high beam of intense creativity. I swatched like a fiend, in the car on the way to and from the funeral. I sat on the kitchen floor with the dog and dashed stitch counts out onto the pages of a notebook with a favorite pen. I ripped back the palm of a mitt I was winging the pattern on, and re-engineered the thumb the way it seemed it would work better – and it did.
Then I vacuumed the house, and was glad for the dog fur gathered in the corners on the old hardwood floors. I sipped homemade root beer in someone else’s cozy kitchen and basked in the presence of friends. I stood with my feet planted solidly on my lawn and watched the sunset, and was aware of the absence of hospital walls.
All these things we go through, alone, as individuals. All these things we share the experience of, across all humanity. We unravel, we pick up, and we go on.