A Change Will Do You Good

I must confess that lately I have not been keeping up with my blog duties. It weighs on my mind. I assure you that it isn't due to death, disease, rehab, or a Paris Hilton media coverage induced coma.

They say that the Oregon Trail had wheel ruts as deep as the hubs on the wagon wheels created by all the people headed out West. This worked out okay for the people on the trail because if the dude who knew how to get where they were going died from a rattler bite, food poisoning or lead poisoning, you could still make out the trail. The problem with the ruts being so deep, though, was it made it difficult to change direction and when it rained you were stuck.

People who live life in the ruts are called such wonderful things: dependable, trust worthy, steady, and faithful. People who live life in the ruts are cursed with some great epithets: boring, monotonous, stagnant, and stuck in the mud.

For those of you who love life in the ruts and those of you who curse life in the ruts, let me divulge a little secret; the amount of energy required to change is tremendous. That woman who knits the same fru-fru scarf every week may harbor a secret desire to knit Fair Isle, but is too afraid to try. That hunkola who stares longingly at you as you knit a sock for your brother, is dying from knitting envy, but is too afraid of small minded people to try it out for himself. The woman with the spiked green hair, piercings, and celtic knotwork tatoo on her upper arm who winked at you as she waited for her latte has a

The effect of change is cumulative. The more smaller changes you make the easier it is to be pried out of the deeper ruts.

I never envisioned that the smaller changes I made would lead to some pretty major ones in my life. I started the blog. I started spinning. I learned to knit socks from the toe up. I applied to grad school. I quit my job of 6 and a half years to work somewhere else. ( I think Hubby is getting nervous that I might change him out. Not a chance. As I have said so often, I have invested 12 years of my life getting him to this point. I am not going to dump him and let some other younger, thinner, cuter woman take advantage of all my hard work to start over with some other guy who only has a great package and a model's physique. Please.)

Now, I am not going to say that knitting socks from the toe up will change your life so dramatically. What I will say is that even the smallest things done differently changes your brain and the way you think. Our brains are a lot like the Oregon Trail. When we do the same things the same way, that neural pathway becomes a neural rut. To do some thing in a different way forces our brains to make new paths - to expand the options of the little neural impulses as they travel around our brains.

Next up I will be learning how to knit socks on two circular needles. I am afraid where I might end up after those new pathways get created. Perhaps it will be Ireland or Scotland. If I am unlucky, I may end up in somewhere too hot to knit. I just have to take that chance.