Why Walking Makes Cents

On December 16, I strapped a Fitbit onto my left wrist where—save for swimming and showers and the occasional reboot—it’s stayed ever since. I’ve always walked. I like to walk, even in cold weather, though I dislike wind and cold. I bought a Fitbit (hereinafter “Fitbit”) because I wanted to track how much I was walking and when, and how that translated into miles and calories and health.

If the scale is right, I’ve lost five pounds. I’m sleeping a lot better, too, according to Fitbit. It measures that, too. But what Fitbit doesn’t measure is mental health and how that translates into creative well-being, because I’ve noticed an uptick—no, a spike—in that.

So many writers are walkers. Wallace Stevens never learned to drive and so walked the two miles to and from his work as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. His neighbors say he would “walk differently” from night to night, even backing up to repeat his steps as he worked out the words in his head. Cheryl Strayed took a 1,000-plus mile hike and writes (famously) about it in her book Wild.  Virginia Woolf and James Joyce set their respective characters on walking journeys through London and Dublin.

But what is it about walking and its link to creativity? According to Ferris Jabr, in his article for The New Yorker “Why Walking Helps Us Think”:

The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. . . . The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. . . . Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down (September 3, 2104).

Because it is winter in New York, I usually walk with my head down. There is ice on the sidewalks and the roads where I walk, secret ice under the thin layer of snow that is there on early mornings. I don’t want to fall, so I walk carefully and sometimes slowly, always with my head down so I can see what’s ahead. The upside of this is the money I find, coins of all denominations usually coated with road salt or mud.

Money is money. The coins go into a red plastic pig that I’ll empty at the end of the year and count up, tangible evidence of what I’ve gained in twelve months of walking.    

Sock It to Me

I started knitting socks in April of 2012. I'd tried socks a couple of times before and was always rewarded with epic fails--big, fat, sloppy socks that bagged at the ankle and could house a family of five. But this time I found a pattern that seemed doable in one of the Yarn Harlot's books and bought a set of bamboo needles (size one, U.S.) that were only a little thicker than a toothpick.

I cast on and set out. I knit while sitting on the love seat in front of the open window. I watched the leaves push out, tiny and green, on the trees across the street. I made one pair, then another. I watched the leaves on the top branches of the trees start to turn and curl. By the end of the summer, I'd made seven pairs--a few of them wearable--and learned a few tricks along the way about short rows, heel shaping and good vs. bad yarns. Since then I've probably knit up a dozen pairs, most of which I've given away as birthday or Christmas gifts. 

The Brevity blog featured this story from the book Art and Fear the other day: 

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot–albeit a perfect one–to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

What's true of pots is true of socks and writing and any other art in which talent runs a distant second to diligence. Practice makes stuff. It's not an event ("I wrote today!") but a process. It does not make perfect or much of anything as Sylvia Plath noted when she wrote: "Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children."

Apparently those advertising people were onto something beyond running when they coined the slogan "Just do it." Whatever it is you've been wanting to do, just do it.

Knit Three, Purl Two

I don’t remember who taught me to knit mittens. It might have been my maternal grandmother, Marie Lok, or maybe it was my mother who guided me from cast on to cast off, who showed me how to increase every three rows to make the thumb placket, to decrease to form the arch that would curve around the tips of my fingers

While cleaning out the deeper recesses of my clothes closet last summer, I found the pattern for those long-ago two needle mittens, a thirty-one-page instruction booklet—priced at twenty cents—published by the Jack Frost Yarn Company (“First Choice of Millions of Knitters”) in the late 1940s. There are instructions for mittens “for the growing child” as well as directions for a pair of women’s lace gloves that are both “pretty and practical” and intricately patterned pair of Norwegian mittens.

Though the edges of a few pages are tattered, most of the pamphlet is surprisingly intact and still readable.

Some years ago I ditched the two-needle pattern and started knitting four-needle mittens. There’s no seam to sew up at the end; when you’re finished knitting, you’re done, save for some knots to tie and some ends to weave in. Unlike socks, which take a dog’s age and require the eyesight of a fighter pilot, you can knit a pair of mittens in a weekend, over the course of a couple of football games. I’ve knit mittens for each of my sisters and for several of my friends. The pair I’m knitting now (pictured here) are for me, necessitated by the fact that the black mittens I’ve been wearing (knit some years ago) have finally worn out. The thumb sprung a leak during my walk yesterday and the yarn is too fragile, too frayed, to repair.

And so this weekend, I’m knitting mittens. The yarn I’m working with is softer than the scratchy wool I remember from the first pair I ever made. This wool is machine washable, too, and the color is a heathered orange that wasn’t featured in any long-ago spectrum.

 The stitches are the same though, knit and purl, the way my mother taught me. Or my grandmother. For the life of me, I can’t remember.