Square 87: 6 changes

I've never liked setting New Year's resolutions, but this year I needed a plan. I spent last fall trying to change too many things about my life and most of them fell flat. So I have adopted a new strategy for 2010.

I have mentioned the Zen Habits blog here before. Leo Babauta, bestselling author of The Power of Less, offers advice on simplifying your life and becoming more productive. He has also designed the 6 Changes Method, a model for changing behaviour, and this is what I have been following.

Here are the basic principles: pick six changes you want to apply in the coming year, address them one at a time instead of all at once, spend two months on each one beginning with small steps and moving to larger, more difficult ones, and be accountable by telling your friends and family.

I've been going with it since the beginning of the month. My first change is to focus on creative writing. I want to finish writing a novel. So I've been getting up earlier to establish a daily writing practice, and it's going well.

Here are a few tips I have learned, partly from personal experience and partly from Babauta's advice:

1. Don't start anything immediately. Make a plan. When you have a new habit in mind, give yourself a week or two before it starts. Choose a date and time. The anticipation will help you prepare.
2. Don't try to change more than one thing at once.
3. When things are going well you might feel inclined to work ahead, but resist the temptation; if you change too many things at once you're more likely to backslide.
4. It takes a minimum of one month to successfully ingrain a new habit, ideally two months.
5. Break each change down into steps and start with one so easy you cannot fail.
6. Make some of your six changes fun.
7. For harder changes, build a reward system into your plan.
8. Forgive yourself. One of my friends suggests an 80/20 rule, so if you follow your plan 80 per cent of the time, that counts as success.
9. Blog about it. It's a good way to be publicly accountable, and your friends can encourage you.

For this square I chose six variegated yarns to represent 6 changes. Some of them are subtle, others more stark, some bright, others earthy, some simple, others complicated.

If you want to simplify or become more productive, there's no reason to wait until next January. Start now. Happy changes!

Square 85: Purple

Violet is the colour associated with Sahasrara, the seventh primary chakra, positioned above the head and also known as the crown chakra. In traditional Indian medicine, the chakras are focal points for transmission of energy through the body. The crown is the chakra of higher consciousness. It is associated with dreams and creativity.

In the new year I have launched a plan to implement six changes in my life, one at a time. I've published the list in my other blog. You are welcome to follow along and encourage me to stick with it. The first and most cherished hope is to focus on creative writing, particuarly a novel I have had in progress for several years. I have designated tomorrow as the day to commence a new writing process dedicated to that goal.

I am calling upon all the forces at my disposal to bring this change about, and so decided to knit a square of purple yarn to direct my conscious and subconsious faculties. I threw in some of Danny's "kitchen sink" handspun yarn, because it is all about the creative process. Writing or making art is an incredible journey and you must be willing to set out with only a sketchy map of the path ahead. Today I stand at the head of the trail.

Square 82: Form

I like taking a simple form and exploring variations upon it. That's one of the appeals of this blanket blog that inspire me onward. As you get to know a form you can experiment within its constraints. Something that seems simple and repetitive may contain infinite variety.

Structure is one of the things that draws us into music, for example. Most popular songs include several verses (V), a chorus (C) in a different but related theme, and often a bridge section (B) introducing a third related theme. These might follow the sequence V-C-V-C-B-C. Songwriters return to this basic structure again and again because it provides listeners with a reference point. Even a new song can be predictable. The combination of predictability and novelty entertains us, and gives us cues to the rhythm and pace of the song.

Classical music commonly uses several musical forms. One of them, the rondo, follows a structure similar to contemporary song structure: A-B-A-C-A-B-A. Each section presents a distinct theme. There may be additional ones (D, E, F), but ultimately the music always returns to the beginning theme.

I have experimented with a particular form in some of these squares, treating each yarn as an individual theme. Sometimes I have tried returning to the same themes symmetrically as in a rondo, but these mitred squares seem more interesting if they culminate in different colours from which they started. The apex of the square focuses the attention, and the colours there, even though they consist of fewer stitches, draw as much attention as the long outside rows, which form a kind of foundation.

So I have invented an original form. I think the first time I used it was in Square 48. I was establishing a colour rhythm, ripples of light and dark moving across the square the way moonlight draws your eye across the layers of a night landscape.

Since then, I have tried variations on that form. This time I used the square to illustrate it. I chose five solid coloured yarns (dark green, grey, vermilion, purple, and apple green) and five variegated yarns in colours closely related to the first five.

I followed a few simple rules in establishing this form. Each colour is used exactly twice, and each never appears next to any other colour more than once. The first three rows establish the first three colours; after that each new colour is followed by an old colour and vice versa, until the last three rows wrap up the last three colours.. I like how it establishes rhythm and harmony among contrasting colours. This square is odd, but it illustrates the pattern well.

A-B-C-A-D-B-E-C-F-D-G-E-H-F-I-G-J-H-I-J.

Square 74: Genie

Yesterday I brought home some shiny Gatsby Lux yarn to incorporate into this blanket. I got infected sitting next to Rachel at Luttuce Knit's knit night recently. Rachel likes glittery yarn, and somehow I came away feeling this project needed some, too. I'm a bit of a natural fibre snob, so this is a new departure for me.

The yarn looked nice with purples and rich browns, colours that immediately make me think of magic. I don't even believe in magic, really, so where do I go from there?

If I found a magic lamp and the genie gave me three wishes, what would I wish for? I suspect most of us would have a hard time resisting the lure of riches, but my first thought was: "Please eliminate all my debt forever."

I didn't have to think about that one for long before recognizing the catch: the underlying problem is my own behaviour. No magic could erase that.

When I was a boy I had everything I needed, most of the things I wanted, and more. My parents were careful. They always had enough money for a comfortable home, new clothes, good food, family vacations plus a lot of things that many people would consider luxuries. And they never went in debt.

Somehow I did not learn from their example. I habitually spend money I don't have. It's not that I live lavishly, certainly not. Most of the time I worry about paying the bills and spend very little money. Then once in a while I feel rich, but instead of working on that debt, I immediately spend what money I have and a little extra.

At the time it feels like I'm rewarding myself for hard work, but in the long run, having no money is no reward. Someone recently pointed out that this behaviour is self-destructive, and suggested I perpetuate the problem because it is familiar and I wouldn't know how to act if I didn't have to worry about it. She was probably right.

When I was a boy I had a little plastic cylinder for banking all the quarters I got from my allowance. I would save money to buy something special every once in a while, usually a new fish for my aquarium. I've always liked pretty things.

Meanwhile I wanted to run away (most children think about it, don't they?), and imagined I could save enough quarters to get by on for a while. But nothing was more terrifying than the thought of being on my own without anyone to look after me. Nowadays I live alone and spend most of the time looking after myself. It's still terrifying sometimes.

I never saved enough to run away, and I never make much progress paying down my credit card, but if there is one thing I could change to make my life better, that would be it. No, a genie couldn't help, but recently I took inspiration from Leo Babauta, who blogs Zen Habits and claims to have changed a "laundry list" of problems and gotten out of debt by simply changing his behaviour. It's going to take some hard work, learning to keep a budget, and changing the way I think about a lot of things. It's a problem I'm ashamed to talk about, but lately I've been putting the word out to a few friends, and with this square I'm going on record, drawing a line in the sand.

Square 66: Elderberry

Across the road from our house, my parents owned a vacant field that verged on a marsh. There I planted several native shrubs, like snowberry, in hope of attracting wildlife. Then I discovered something growing wild there, one of the things that birds like best: an elderberry bush. I tried making jam from the berries, but it failed. It was full of the seeds, and the sugar crystallized. I didn't make successful elderberry jelly until many years later. But this plant remains for me an icon: nature feeding us, feeding itself, sustenance, sweetness, the cycle of life. Coincidentally, the dark purple Cascade yarn I chose to use as a common thread throughout this blog blanket is precisely the colour of ripe elderberries.

So it was with particular guilt that I cut down an elderberry bush at Danny's house yesterday. In this small Toronto backyard it was not just growing, but burgeoning, taking over its corner, threatening to shoulder the house aside. Elderberries favour moist, rich soil, and I think this part of the city used to be part of Lake Ontario, so the roots must have lots of rank, dark, dirty depths to thrive upon.

The birds came to feed on the berries every summer. I've made jelly from them, and Danny has dyed yarn. The greenish-grey fibre in this square came from that dye pot. So we owe that shrub a lot of thanks.

Instead, we cut it down. Sometimes plants get in the way. It's a fact of life in the city, where space is limited.

When I approached the shrub with gloves and saw, I startled a robin and some white-throated sparrows (Bill has also seen a tribe of Baltimore orioles there). They hesitated to fly away, hovering around as I began hacking at the branches. They couldn't believe it. But by the time the brush all lay in a pile, they had given up and gone away. Later in the afternoon, a forlorn wood thrush appeared on the fence and looked around, casting a mournful, beady glance in my direction, flicking its rusty brown tail in indignation. It circled the yard once or twice before fluttering away in silence and despair.

Guilty. I am guilty.

But as a phoenix rises from the ashes, so a hacked elderberry will re-emerge from the muck, if not here then somewhere else. This particular plant has been cut to the ground several times already. Our world will not soon be rid of them. Ontario will have plenty of fruit for jelly and dye, and for the wild ones to eat.

Square 65: Progress report

When this idea started to roll, I was fresh with enthusiasm and pumping out four squares per week. I planned to make a full-size blanket, perhaps five by six feet in dimension, and calculated about 14 by 17 squares would be about right: 238 in total. It would take me well into next year.

Then full-time work started lining up and I became busy with other things. I couldn't keep up the knitting pace. At the current rate it would take several years to make that many squares. I balked. I wanted to stop and finish the blanket right away. I was ready to give up.

But new stories kept suggesting themselves. I realized I didn't need to have a definite time frame; I could work until the blanket told me it was ready.

A few days ago when I had completed 63 squares, I laid them all out, nine by seven. It was a great size for a wall-hanging. Once again I contemplated making just a few more squares to round out the stories, finishing, and moving on to a new project.

But whenever I start thinking that way, the squares tell me, "No, we still have more stories to tell." It is like any pilgrimage. It is like life. You can't see where you are going in detail, because you have never been there. You don't know how long it will take, because you can't predict what will happen along the way. But the destination matters less than the journey itself.

I've learned a lot from this trip. I had never used more than two different yarns in one project before. Now I routinely use nine or ten in a single square. Knitting has evolved into a way of painting a landscape, a dream, or a thought.

I have explored the way colours interact, and it's different from coloured pencils or paints, which you can combine to create any colour. The colour of the yarns is immutable, but I am beginning to discover how to use similarities and contrasts to draw out highlights and undertones. A variegated yarn looks very different whether laid alongside a deep red or a muted red.

Perhaps the most obvious change has been the shift from cool, dark colours to neutrals, and warm and bright (inspect the gallery). This is not just superficial. My favourite colour has always been deep blue, followed by green and purple, but I am actually becoming enamoured with orange and its allies. This blanket began as a way to use up yarn in my stash, but has evolved into an excuse to acquire single skeins of anything that catches my eye. This square incorporates several new acquisitions.

I don't regret that, because I know they'll all come to good use over the long haul. Long after finishing this blanket, I'll continue using yarn to tell stories. Hats and scarves will never be the same.