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I love knots.
One of the Greek myths I read when I was little was about the Gordian knot. I no longer know why the Gordian knot existed or who had to untangle it (was it one of the labors of Hercules?). The knot was huge and hopelessly tangled, so the hero solved the problem by slicing through the knot with a sharp sword. A very sharp sword.
Even when I was young I hated that solution. A knot is not to be cut. A knot is to be unpicked. I knew that at ten, and I still know it. As I was writing the paragraph above, I realized for the first time that the mythical solution was a male one. Got a problem? Take the sword to it. End of problem. Whereas my approach would have been (had I been the heroine of that myth) to tease the knot, to worry at it, to pick at it, to find an end and wiggle it loose. In short, to untie the knot. It would have taken longer, but when I was finished, I would have had a lovely length of rope to play with.
I thought of this recently, when I was faced with undoing four knots on a pair of antique tingshaws a friend had given me. They were strung on a golden cord in an odd way and could be played only by using a mallet or stick. I wanted them to balance at each end of the cord so I could ding them together in the usual tingshaw way. I've actually had them for several years, but I finally decided it was time to restring them. So I began undoing the knots.
What a pleasure it was to sit by the window in my little maple chair and gently tug at this or that loop of the cord. And how satisfying it was when I loosened a bit so that the end could be pulled through. Success! That's the feeling. The feeling of successfully performing a task. No animals (or vegetables either, for that matter) were harmed in the performance of this task. It was just untying a knot.
All it takes is patience.
During the ten years I spent knitting one-of-a-kind sweaters, sometimes four or five a week, I often came upon tangled skeins of yarn, veritable rats' nests of tangled yarn. I would patiently sit on my stool and undo them. Very occasionally I'd have to give up (this point was reached more quickly when I was dealing with a cheap yarn that was in good supply) and then I'd take the scissors (my version of Hercules's sharp sword) to the whole mess.
But mostly, I untangled.
Even though I didn't know it at the time, undoing knots was a form of meditation. I had to remain in the moment, remain with the yarn—the beautiful wools shorn from lovingly tended sheep, the wool carefully carded and spun and dyed so that I could make sweaters from it. That yarn deserved my attention and my time.
If someone else is around when I am undoing a knot, this onlooker may become very impatient. "Just cut it and let's get on with life!" she'll say. "How can you waste your time undoing a knot?" She doesn't get it.
I can't even honestly say that it's about meditation and being in the moment. It's really all about satisfaction. It's about saying "I did it!" I get the same feeling when I undo the stitched cord on a bag of flour or cat litter. You know what I mean—those pesky closings no two of which are ever alike. Some are stitched with a two-thread machine, some with a one-thread machine. And the way to unstitch them varies with the kind of machine. But I love the challenge. I love the thrill when I pull the right thread and the entire stitching unravels so that in just a few seconds I have a nice long uncut string (or two) and a neat opening edge. Of course, the thread used for this stitching is so cheap that you don't want to keep it, not even in the drawer marked "string too short to use." So you end up throwing it out. But first you have the satisfaction of feeling it unstitch, feeling the thread loops unpick from the holes in the bag. Success.
We can't possibly predict the little hidden pleasures in a stranger's life.
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