tangled

We went to the library the other day... and I found a book on knitting that I have never picked up before. No, I wouldn't say I am knitter- you might have to finish more than a project or two to consider yourself a "knitter." Well, maybe if you put some of my half projects together, you could say... never mind. Let's just say I do know how to knit and once in a while, I am really in the mood- like when I pick up a new book from the library! I had fun flipping through the book, and decided on a small project that I thought I could handle, and that I had the yarn for. And then- I found this...
... a mess of tangles. I started casting on stitches, thinking that maybe the mess would just unravel itself. Of course that never happened, and I had to set aside my new project and dig into the mess. It took me over an hour to get through the twists and turns and knots... several times I was tempted to grab my ever-handy scissors and scrap the yarn... but I kept on. Sometimes I think, you just have to... keep on. Life is messy- sometimes messier than we think we can handle, and yet, we don't throw in the towel, we keep on. I thought about that as I unwound that lime green mess... I thought about how we think that we have found the right path, and sometimes have to backtrack. I thought about how sometimes you just have to grab life from one side and stretch it a bit so that you might better be able to see your next steps. I thought about how, once in a while the tangle, whether we have happened upon it or created it, seems so big that you'll never get through it, and then, all of a sudden, with that last ditch effort, the whole mess comes free. Free to wrap up in a nice tidy package, and move on... and make something of it. So, maybe, while life can be like a box of chocolates, it can also be yards and yards of brilliantly tinted yarn.