When I was younger, I’ll be honest , this kind of slightly trite saying would always illicit an eye roll of gigantic proportions from me. It was the kind of thing my mum or grandma would come out with usually while berating me for being clumsy, thoughtless or impatient - or all three.
Now of course I am much more aware of just how true it is, never more so than when I drive ‘up north’ to stay with my mum. The sat nav does a great job with motorways and A roads, it helped me neatly avoid an accident at Doncaster and I was very grateful for it. It’s laughable though how it copes (or doesn’t cope) with the last 10 miles of mainly rural roads.
Obviously I know the roads and cheerfully ignore most of it’s suggestions - convinced as it is that the single track road* it keeps urging me to take will shave a whole 2 minutes off the journey.
*the road isn’t the one in the picture although it’s of similar proportions.
Now it might, that’s true. Some days the traffic gods are in your favour and you could sail straight through. Other days you could come across a huge milk lorry having a stand off with a caravan and resign yourself to having a 200m reverse.
I’d much rather take the slightly slower but infinitely more predictable route (and pick up some pies from the bakers as I go past).
There is often an inherent assumption that fast is best. Everything is sold to you on the basis of speed from quick drying nail varnish to shiny knitting needle tips.
But not everything needs to be taken at full tilt. Sometimes it’s nice to paint my nails and then have to sit and read a book on my Kindle for half an hour - it’s a great excuse not to do anything.
Sometimes it’s nice to put a jacket potato in the oven and have a bath before dinner rather than pinging one in the microwave.
Sometimes it’s nice to just sit and knit for a bit, as a relaxing experience rather than hurrying to get the stitches from one needle to another. I always think it’s amusing when non knitters ask how long something took me to knit. As though the time involved were the most important factor.
And even more amused when they find it hard to understand that I can’t give them an exact answer. I very rarely time anything that precisely, knitting time is measured in days and weeks (or months) after all, rather than hours. It fits around other tasks rather than being the actual task itself.
I have experimented with timing my knits before. When I’ve done the occasional commission I have used an app called Toggl which is essentially just a glorified stopwatch to keep track of how long I’ve spent on a project. It does the job but still can’t fully capture all the time spent on a project (the 5 minutes in a bank queue, or the 10 minutes you had while waiting on hold).
Using the app also seems to take a bit of the joy out of knitting as well. When I sit down to knit and tap the timer it seems much more of a time transaction, a visual reminder that I am now using that time to knit and nothing else. It’s less about the experience of knitting and more about being ‘on the clock’
Nowadays I tend to just come up with a ballpark figure based on previous experience and work from there.
In a world where speed and efficiency is prized above all else, sometimes I’m just happy to plod along at my own pace.
I still get where I’m going, maybe a bit slower but hopefully more relaxed and with less reversing.
The last line is 👌 So often when we’re going as fast as we can, we’re trying to speed along, tick things off, we end up missing something, slipping up or something happens and we end up having to reverse to redo or course correct.
Such a lovely reminder. It has been really freeing recently to resist the way the world is pushing us all towards max efficiency: to indulge in slowness feels like an act of resistance. I recently saw (and wrote about) the PG tips ads advertising a fast brewing tea offering "perfection but faster" that epitomised this senseless rush. I like my tea sipped slowly and savoured.