To Knit or not to Knit? That is the Puzzle

I am one of those people that, when I take a personality test, have a tendency to rank highest on the two most completely opposite things. I have often said that one part of me drives the other part crazy! So, I am a weird mixture of both extrovert and introvert. The last two blog posts have been all about me and collective play, being part of social groups. In class, I shared how I love to host and be part of theme parties.This is the extrovert in me. I enjoy time with people and get energy from being with interesting people I trust, and with whom I can talk, laugh, and play. On the other hand, I am not like most extroverts who hate being alone, who don't like silence or times of stillness. I not only like solitude and stillness, I need them to rest, refill, rejuvenate and restore. I have to have that time to myself just as much as I have to have time with people. I like to read and write creatively, think about and plan travel adventures, do paper crafting, or occasionally be out in nature on my own. This is the introvert in me. My mom used to say I would come home from a semester away at school, go to my bedroom and pretty much stay there for two weeks, alone, then come out re-energized and ready to go again. So, while I would primarily type myself as an extrovert, I think it's important to our understanding of play to avoid a dichotomous view of extroverted and introverted, or of collective players and solitary players, because it seems to me that people are a unique and complex mix of both along a spectrum, not an either/or.

Where I feel like I've particularly lost some of myself as a player is in my solitary play time. When I'm alone, that's when I feel like I need to be getting to work on something, because there's always something to be working on. I rarely read for pleasure any more, and I miss that terribly, but I know that when I start a book, I better have time to read the whole thing, because I'm not likely to put it down....so I just don't start one. : ( With my paper crafting, I need to have the space to leave it out so I can work on it a bit at a time, but I don't have that space at present. By the time I get it all out and put it all away, it's more time than I can afford, and it's too much tidying for me. Yet, after last semester, when I pretty much eliminated all play and most rest, I realized the importance of finding solitary, enjoyable activities which need the minimum amount of space and equipment that I can play at for short amounts of time in order to clear my brain, relax, reduce stress, and rejuvenate. That's when I decided I would learn to knit- or more accurately, "re-learn", as someone had taught me the first time some 25-30 years ago.

I chose knitting because I love fibers, the act of creation, the simplicity of materials and minimal expense to begin. It is also easy to transport, to do in small places or when you only have a few minutes. One of my friends who knits agreed to come over yesterday and teach me the basics to get started. Excitedly, I  went to the fibre arts store downtown to buy needles and yarn. The owner there is fantastic and super helpful. When I explained I was a beginner, she talked with me about which needles would be best for starting, and explained the differences in yarns that would be easiest to work with as a novice. I walked out with a lovely, sleek pair of size 7 bamboo needles, and some warm yellow yarn-my mom's favorite color- with which to practice, as it would show my stitches clearly. My friend came over and we began by looking for the beginning thread in the skein of yarn I had bought.....and that's as far as we got.

See, what happened is that we could NOT find the beginning of the yarn! You usually reach into the center of the skein, and there it is. She reached in....nope. I reached in....nope. After several reachings, the skein was turning into Boston Turnpike on a holiday weekend. We finally found the beginning of the yarn, but by this time, the skein was a tangled mass of yellowness on my living room floor, and we both had meetings to get to. At first, my inner rigid self thought, "Now what?! I didn't play like I planned! What am I going to do? What will I play at instead?" yada, yada, yada. But then, I remembered what my knitting friend said about how winding yarn, and even the process of having to unsnarl a bit could be rather therapeutic. So I decided to go for it....and instead of playing at knitting, I found myself doing a puzzle. As I followed the yellow trail through the twisted yarn pile, it was kinda fun to figure out my way through the maze, and the very tidy and organized part of me took great satisfaction in establishing order out of the chaos, and I actually had  to make myself quit working at the puzzle to finish other things!

So what did I learn from play plans gone awry? First of all, regardless of the fact that I never did get to the knitting part, I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and how it connected to Sutton-Smith's chapter on the rhetoric of self, and how play in our postmodern, consumerist world is about freedom, self-expression, conspicuous playfulness, internal motivation, and individual experience. For us in the modern western world, things like knitting, crocheting, or fishing are now primarily hobbies-forms of play or recreation-with the exception of a small minority of people, such as commercial fishermen, or artisan knitters. The tools of these historical trades have become "toys" for many of us, important to our play, but not to our survival, which we can choose to use as forms of expression of our subjective selves-or not. Many of us have disposable income and disposable "time" to spend on differing pursuits solely to please ourselves, and spend enormous amounts doing so. These become extensions of self, rather than necessities to feed and clothe a community. What was historically considered work and still is in many parts of the world is play for those of us who can afford it. Our wealth allows us access to toys, places and times for our individualistic, consumeristic play that others may not have. As Sutton-Smith says of the Self rhetoric: "Its hegemony is the superiority of those who have access to the kinds of places...where such  experiences are available" (p. 199). And so I wonder if the rhetoric of Self is also primarily connected to those of us who can "afford" it, that is, if it is primarily culturally and historically situated in our postmodern consumerist culture . This idea connects to the Oriard quote in the chapter, which states that there has been a "widely acknowledged shift in America from work-centered culture to one that has increasingly privileged the values of play...the desire to play and transform work into a 'game' has increased dramatically over the past century and a half" (pp.179, 180).

Beyond these more philosophical musings, I also learned to "play with what ya got". I went from a plan to knit to playing with a maze puzzle.  "Working" to unsnarl that yarn once again called into question what is play, how we make something play, if work can become play, if we can play while we work, and who decides what is play- shades of the questions we are asking in class which challenge a binary between work and play.

Finally, as I type this, it occurs to me that that tangled mass of fibre slowly becoming a ball of yarn is a metaphor for what we are doing in class- untangling ideas of play, weaving in and out of snarls in thinking, slowly making some semblance of order out of chaos....until the ball of ideas falls and rolls across the floor of our minds, only to be reconsidered, rewound....containing multiple possibilities for what is eventually "knitted" together. It will be interesting to see what finally emerges from the tangles...