When it's time to sit on your hands

Wishing and Hoping baby blanket

When astronauts and people in other mission critical professions are being trained there is an exercise they use called ‘Sit on your hands’. In short they are presented with a critical systems failure and asked to solve it. The first thing they are trained to do is to estimate the time they have available before people will start to die. Then for half of that time they DO NOTHING. They literally sit on their hands if they have to.

They can talk the problem over, they can come up with ideas, discuss what will work and put in place a plan for making that happen. But they do not touch a tool, a piece of equipment or a keyboard until half their allotted time is up.

The rationale goes that this ‘sit on your hands’ time is crucial to avoid people diving in and making the situation worse. When faced with a critical issue our first reactions often come from a place of emotion. It’s easy to think you know what needs to be done when you are being driven by the more primitive, emotional centres of the brain. The desire to act, to do something can literally override everything else.

Adding in a pause gives your logic and higher brain functions time to take over. To think the way around the problem. To identify solutions that will work and importantly to find ways that the intended solution might not work. Far better to identify the critical error in your reasoning during the ‘sit on your hands’ phase than when you have just loosened the wrong bolt and vented your crucial oxygen out into space.

Obviously knitting is nowhere near this in terms of life and death scenarios. No one is going to die because we have mis-crossed a cable or unaccountably knitted a toe on the wrong side of a sock (yes I have, please don’t ask). But such errors are bound to happen and they are undeniably frustrating when they do.

Often we dive in straight in to fix them in an effort to erase our mistake and make everything perfect again. We are so seized with the need to make it right that we don’t stop to think too much.

But so often I have come to regret this. It’s only after attempting to pull out a cable or a complicated lace section that I realise there was another, simpler course of action. One that would have resulted in significantly less swearing. But by that point, it’s usually too late and I have to plough on, sometimes unravelling far more than I ever intended to.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have painstakingly ripped back a whole section because my stitch count was off - only to find that I had actually miscounted. My stitch count was fine - it was my numeracy (or my eyesight) that was at fault.

First…do nothing

So now I have a ‘sit on my hands policy’ when it comes to knitting errors. If I find a mistake I first of all, do nothing. I put the WIP to one side and wait - maybe an hour but more usually until the next day when I have clear daylight and time on my side. Then I reassess and determine what needs to be done. Whether I have actually made an error or whether I just thought that I had.

It seems frustrating to have to wait, but more often than not this simple practice ends up actually saving me time in the long run.

This is No. 6 in a series of Essays for the 24 Essays Club hosted by

Claire Venus

. Other posts in this series include:

1. What’s my why

2. Swedish Death Cleaning

3. Never knit with green yarn

4. No politics please…we’re knitters

5. Eyes down for a Substack summer