The other day, my little nephew, who can say a mere handful of words, pulled out a pretty impressive one: “delivery.”

Eh, why spend all that energy on one, two, and three syllable words when you can jump to four? It’s a testament to his love of vehicles and the value of intrinsic motivation that he summoned the wherewithal to name the delivery truck.

Well, actually, it came out more as “delivawee.” But it was recognizable.

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Somewhere along the line, some of us got the message that we have to be perfect to be loved or worthy.

It can be tough to live with, especially if we don’t consciously realize that we’re carrying this weight with us all the time.

Daily existence becomes a precarious scramble up a mountain path where both sides are crumbling into nothing. To be wrong is to fall into the darkness. One false move and we’re plunging into the abyss, where no one can save us.

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My mind was blown when I figured out I could fix mistakes in my knitting.

Even if I saw a mistake several rows back, I didn’t have to rip everything out. I didn’t even have to rip out all the rows between me and my mistake. I could simply release a stitch or two, do some surgery, and then it would be like the mistake never happened.

Since I make lots of mistakes, this is something I’ve gotten pretty good at.

Of course, there are some mistakes for which repair would take several hours — or it’s just straight-up impossible. Hopefully these mistakes are also in the category of “no one would notice this but the pattern designer” or “I have to hunt to find that twisted stitch anyway.” I let them go.

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When I first moved to Atlanta a million years ago, I used to get lost on purpose.

This was the pre-smartphone era. I actually had a paper city map that I would use to find my destination, scribbling the turn-by-turn directions down on the back of an envelope the way we used to do in the olden days. 

I would make my way to my destination using the map, and then I would find my home without it. Sometimes this led to trafficky adventures in unsavory neighborhoods, but I always figured it out eventually.

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You could say that the point of making something is to have that thing when you’re done.

But if that were truly the case then it would be more economical (sometimes in terms of time and money) to just go buy whatever it is that you’re trying to make. Chances are, you can find it at a low-cost retailer for a fraction of of what you would spend on buying the materials, let alone the opportunity cost of the time spent making a thing.

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