A full skein of yarn lay tangled and mangled on the living room floor. My husband looked on in mild terror - I knew he was expecting me to ask for help with the impossible mess. When I told him I didn’t need him to help, he relaxed and refocused on the movie we were watching.
I sighed and sat down to conquer the massive tangle. Jim would glance over occasionally as if he expected me to cave and beg for his help. But I was determined to sort this out on my own. I finally found a loose end and began to follow its path. I admit that I was tempted to just cut the yarn and be done with it. This happened, though, to be the most expensive yarn I’d ever purchased. Scissors were not an option.
I sighed and sat down to conquer the massive tangle. Jim would glance over occasionally as if he expected me to cave and beg for his help. But I was determined to sort this out on my own. I finally found a loose end and began to follow its path. I admit that I was tempted to just cut the yarn and be done with it. This happened, though, to be the most expensive yarn I’d ever purchased. Scissors were not an option.
This wasn’t just stubbornness on my part though; I had a method that I knew would make this job easier. As I worked with the yarn, I kept shaking it out, preventing it from getting tight and knotted up. I approached this project as one big tangle rather than as a solid knot I needed to crack. Sure it took some time, but it went a lot faster than if I had tugged and fought with the mess. I didn’t allow frustration to take over and make me pull hard and make all kinds of knots. Shake, untangle, shake, untangle, shake, shake, shake.
Some time over the past year of so, I’d heard or read something that went approximately like this: there is not such thing as a knot, there are only tangles. Some are tighter than others but they are simply tangles.
In untangling yarn, you have to follow where the yarn goes, you can’t just take off on your own and make it be a certain way. The yarn is going where it’s going and the minute you try to force it to follow the path you want, it knots up. It stops, it locks up and there you are with an even bigger mess to sort out.
This concept gave me a completely different perspective on problems that were not yarn related. When faced with a challenge these days, I don’t immediately set out to just fix it. Now I take a few minutes to think about what’s really going on. I try to follow the strands and see the pattern of the problem. What are the ins and outs? What thing is wrapped around another thing? In other words, what is my first step, my second step, etc.
In untangling yarn, if you do things out of order, things just get worse. I’ve really be paying attention to this over the past year and whenever I need to sort out some life problem, if I look at it as just a tangle rather than a knot frozen and solid, I not only find reasonable solutions but I am calmer and there is a lot less drama around the situation.
You might think that this takes a lot of personal discipline but it doesn’t really. What it takes is the willingness to slow down and think and the desire to act rather than react. What’s the difference? Scissors is reacting, sitting down and untangling is acting.
One might take a bit more time than the other but most of the time reacting only creates knots and more tangles essentially creating more problems in the wake of the original one. Acting is conscious, it comes out of a sense of knowing what to do.
This doesn’t mean that your actions will always be perfect and it doesn’t mean that you will always make the right choices. Some of your ‘acting’ might not be the right solution, but from this you can learn and make difference choices. Reacting leaves no room for learning and choices, it’s rather like kicking in all the windows because one of them is stuck. Acting would be trying to open the other windows first.
With reacting you have a house full of broken windows and huge repair bill, with acting you might have sore arms from tugging at stuck windows. And there are lots of ways to try to get a window unstuck so you might learn something in the process. If it comes to having to break a window, then you will have tried everything else first, and then you’d only have to break one, not a whole house full.
So are you an actor or a reactor. Do you have problems or tangles?
You can choose, even now if you are embroiled in a massive, collosial problem, you can choose, you can reframe it into a tangle. It might be a huge messy tangle, but tangles are solvable, the more you shake them the more they reveal their secrets.
Let go of your knots, shake your life and let it reveal its secrets and its solutions.
Some time over the past year of so, I’d heard or read something that went approximately like this: there is not such thing as a knot, there are only tangles. Some are tighter than others but they are simply tangles.
In untangling yarn, you have to follow where the yarn goes, you can’t just take off on your own and make it be a certain way. The yarn is going where it’s going and the minute you try to force it to follow the path you want, it knots up. It stops, it locks up and there you are with an even bigger mess to sort out.
This concept gave me a completely different perspective on problems that were not yarn related. When faced with a challenge these days, I don’t immediately set out to just fix it. Now I take a few minutes to think about what’s really going on. I try to follow the strands and see the pattern of the problem. What are the ins and outs? What thing is wrapped around another thing? In other words, what is my first step, my second step, etc.
In untangling yarn, if you do things out of order, things just get worse. I’ve really be paying attention to this over the past year and whenever I need to sort out some life problem, if I look at it as just a tangle rather than a knot frozen and solid, I not only find reasonable solutions but I am calmer and there is a lot less drama around the situation.
You might think that this takes a lot of personal discipline but it doesn’t really. What it takes is the willingness to slow down and think and the desire to act rather than react. What’s the difference? Scissors is reacting, sitting down and untangling is acting.
One might take a bit more time than the other but most of the time reacting only creates knots and more tangles essentially creating more problems in the wake of the original one. Acting is conscious, it comes out of a sense of knowing what to do.
This doesn’t mean that your actions will always be perfect and it doesn’t mean that you will always make the right choices. Some of your ‘acting’ might not be the right solution, but from this you can learn and make difference choices. Reacting leaves no room for learning and choices, it’s rather like kicking in all the windows because one of them is stuck. Acting would be trying to open the other windows first.
With reacting you have a house full of broken windows and huge repair bill, with acting you might have sore arms from tugging at stuck windows. And there are lots of ways to try to get a window unstuck so you might learn something in the process. If it comes to having to break a window, then you will have tried everything else first, and then you’d only have to break one, not a whole house full.
So are you an actor or a reactor. Do you have problems or tangles?
You can choose, even now if you are embroiled in a massive, collosial problem, you can choose, you can reframe it into a tangle. It might be a huge messy tangle, but tangles are solvable, the more you shake them the more they reveal their secrets.
Let go of your knots, shake your life and let it reveal its secrets and its solutions.