Knitting Lessons

I spent a bit of time today at the knitting class in my building.
 
Didn't take me for a knitter, did you? I'm not--well, I wasn't--but when the building's community committee announced the class, my son was fascinated. He is a clever guy with all sorts of things you create with your hands (not just Legos), so he and I went last week, and by the end of two hours, we were off and running. Today, at the follow up, one of his sisters joined us. Have we made sweaters yet? No, but we all have growing "something's" on our knitting needles.

Why is this blogworthy? Well, I might talk about how therapeutic it was to step away from life's responsibilities for a while, or how endearing it was to watch a room full of older women share their knitting experience with my kids. But the reason that compelled me to write about this was something the teacher said as a woman was bemoaning a stitch mistake she'd made. "It's not a mistake," the teacher said. "It just didn't turn out the way you expected."
 
What she said was so simple, and obviously, it was meant as an encouragement to people who were learning something new. But in the course of the day, I continued to think about her words, and how transferable they are to so many things we face in life. We can choose to think of a lot of the things we do as mistakes. Which is, frankly, debilitating. Of course, we can pull out all the sayings about learning from mistakes, which might be great, and are probably true, but to think of some of those mistakes simply as things that turned out differently than expected seems a lot more productive. It's not that we can't learn from them. It's just that we can also view them as just variations that we might not otherwise have seen.
 
I'm not sure I will get any farther than a scarf, but I know I'm finding this knitting thing to be a welcome diversion from some of the mundane or stressful things in life.
 
Who knew that I'd come away with a life lesson as well?