On knitting and urgency

It’s been a while. How are you all?

I hope your celebrations and New Year have been beautiful, filled with the things you love. Possibly even with a tiny bit of time squeezed in somewhere for writing!

For my part: life has moved apace for me and the community I live in.

Amidst all of the Holiday rush and hoo-ha, we had a wake up call: one of our friends who has battled cancer for some time came home to die, and did.

It sounds so small for something so final, and I guess that it can even look like it’s trivialised in that sentence up there.

But I’ve been looking for the gifts in the whole experience, and I think I’ve found them.

Before our friend came home, he was in hospital, and things were deteriorating.

His wife put a call out on a Facebook group that had been created to support them for people to knit and donate 20x20cm squares, that were going to be sewn into a blanket to keep him warm. He’d lost a lot of weight, and our neck of the woods is known for sudden cold snaps.

Every two days or so, she’d update the Facebook status with encouragement to knit our squares, updates on his condition and how it was progressing, and occasionally a message to ‘Hurry up, we need this NOW!’

That blanket grew so fast, you’d think we all had nothing to organise for end of year celebrations.

It was inspiring, and awesome.

Of course, we were knitting fast because our friend was dying. It was just one way to show our love for him and his family in his last days. But we were also knitting fast because we were accountable. There would be days coming where the blanket would be front and centre of ceremonies and memorials, and we wanted our square to be there. We didn’t want to be left out.

Contrast this to when my community knits squares for a blanket for a new baby.

Usually, the call goes out, or somone decides that this time they’re in charge of organising it, and people say that they’re on board. People even usually select a date for when the squares have to knitted and delivered by.  And everyone says that they’re committed.

But are they?

A baby blanket can take up to a year to get knitted and put together, and it’s much smaller than the double-bed sized blanket that our friend’s wife managed to pull together in ten days. Why does a blanket for a newborn take so much longer to come together?

The answer, my friends, is urgency.

It was the urgency of wanting our friend to know that we had his back: that his community loved him and would keep him warm. He needed to know this before he died, and we’re lucky that he did.

A baby is slightly less urgent. They can receive a blanket whenever it’s ready. And we tend to want to make it perfect, too. There can’t be uneven edges, it’s a question of honouring that new soul.

Our friend’s blanket – we just churned that out, in a rainbow of colours, with a variety of textures, and stitched the whole thing together with cream wool to unify it. We could have gotten a whole lot more precious about it, and made drama, but instead we made a blanket. A whole big blanket, wonky and with the occasional hole, but perfect.

If you’re contemplating committing to something in 2014, perhaps even writing a book, then think hard about whether you’re urgent enough about your project to ensure that it happens.

Sure, you can plan out your book and make sure that it’s all meticulously in place with no uneven edges, but it will take you longer, and may not get stitched up at all.

When you’re urgent enough to just get on with it, then you’ll get that thing done, regardless of whatever else life is throwing at you. You’ll have uneven edges and wonky bits, and threads hanging out the back, but it’ll be done.

Then you can go and fix it and make it as you envisioned it. Later, after you’ve created the thing.

Now that the blanket exists for our friend, we’re weaving in the loose threads and finding a backing for it. There is a larger vision. It will be a knitted quilt when it’s done.

Without someone on your back, asking the hard questions, you might just ‘forget’ you have a book on the go because other things shout louder.

I don’t want you to let that happen.

Take it from me: I have just watched a friend, father, husband, die too young.

Get urgent about the things you dream of doing.

Write your book now.

Use whatever you need to help. If you need to go off to a hut in a forest to write your book, then do that. If you need a coach, or a cheerleader or to organise yourself accountability, then do that.

Whatever you do, do it now. Make it happen.

Because we’re all living with urgency, it’s just that we forget.