What Granny thinks while knitting
My grandmother knits. She has always done so ever since I can remember. Watching her knit, it’s clear that there are two things happening. Firstly, she is knitting. Actively unravelling a ball of wool, expertly hooking the strand with the sharp tip, wrapping it around a finger, staking the loop to create a knit and then repeating. More interestingly, however, is the second activity. Which is more difficult to describe, and one I’m going to dedicate a lot of time to do so. She’s sitting, absorbed in her repetitive activity, while at the same time she’s thoughtlessly… thinking?
What Granny knows, that we don’t
Thinking is what I’ve gone with, but it is an admittedly unsatisfactory description of this secondary activity. All humans know this space of being and can likely reflect upon where it is we do this. I like to doodle. Just like with Granny, this brings about my secondary activity of thoughtless thinking. It’s where my mind is free to explore as if turning over stones just to see what is under them. This kind of thoughtless thinking is passive, where there is no intention to the thought. Just thoughts, turning things over. This is notably different to active thinking, which requires us to set intentions, concentrate and work towards some sort of outcome. Society favours the active, intentional kind of thinking, at the cost of undervaluing passive thinking like Granny’s knit thinking. This form of knit thinking has three big twenty-first century enemies: productivity, attention and control.
It’s first enemy is productivity. Modern life insists we be productive. Productivity is most obvious in our professional spaces but is equally erosive in our personal and social spaces. There is a growing expectation that time needs to be ‘well’ spent, be it at work, home or even with friends. This experience is undoubtedly exacerbated by technology, which comes with the promise of making us more productive while creating opportunities to share -and compare- the fruits of our productivity. These growing expectations of tech and society feel extremely un-human. There is little space for natural ebbs and flows of life- we seem to insist only on flows. We don’t approve of doing nothing productive and having nothing to show for it.
It’s second enemy is attention, stimulated by the attention economy initially, but now too easily integrated with our daily lives in an ‘opt-in take-my-attention’ type of manner. It’s worth stating my disdain for the design of the attention economy, but I also believe we have willingly shifted in the name of spending time usefully (see above). I’ve found myself guilty of this recently, where I make extra good use of my time by doubling up running with a podcast. It’s too easy to think it’s a valuable use of time, to share my attention with the world of content. It’s not, and it comes at the cost of neglecting space for thoughtless thinking, which leaves your attention without any space to attend to itself. The great irony of tech’s promise to make us more productive, is the fact that your attention is paying it’s bills, resulting in a lack of productivity. We’re left in an awkward attention middle ground, neither being productive nor cultivating the space for Granny-like knit thinking.
The last enemy is control. A crazy idea that we need to somehow manage our wayward thoughts because somehow they are bad or not useful. Closely linked to productivity, is the fluency in which we believe our thoughts need to be presented. We’re taught from a young age to figure out quickly what is right and state the right answer clearly. We have little tolerance for non-linear thought processes and even less for thoughts that lead to no answers at all. I think this is captured in the difference between dialogue and debate, in both the individual and collective. Our dialogue is often debate. Dialogue lacks control; it is a nonlinear exploration. Debates are controlled and linear, insisting on productively getting to the right answers. We lack the ability to hold dialogue, both in the individual and collective, in a curious unintentional manner that’s generous in space and time which allows us to really observe. Simply turning over stones to see what’s there.
How do we do Granny's knit think?
I was taught a great word by my Jungian psychologist- circumambulating. Circumambulating has its origins in religion, where one may circle a holy space, slowly and intentionally looking at all the artefacts in order to experience a spiritual moment. It requires slowness, intent and attention. Psychologist Carl Jung used this as a metaphor, of slowly and intentionally circling your own thoughts in order to discover what might emerge, or what you might experience, in the process. Looking at this not just as a metaphor for the abstract, as suggested by Jung — circling your thoughts — but as a potential methodology to do the abstract is encouraging. The physical act of circumambulating unlocks the mental act of circumambulating too.
I’m attracted to the idea of really walking around something simply to observe it, not with the intent of outcome but for experiencing it for its own sake. Travel offers us this experience over an extended period of time, where the point of travel is, by productive measures, pointless. Similarly to granny’s knitting, the primary activity while travelling is to see and experience something new, culture or nature; while the second activity is this kind of knit thinking, which is brought on by the anti-productive, full-attention, un-uncontrolled headspace that being a tourist and observer creates.
It’s clear from Granny, physical and mental circumambulation don’t have to be linked, and you don’t need to be a fully immersed traveller either. Granny’s knitting shows us that we can achieve these spaces in daily routines, after tea or before Oprah. She’s created an environment for her mind to circumambulate. If travel, knitting and spiritual spaces have this in common, what other activities can one do that creates the space for the mind to explore in this way? Answering this question, I’ve been playing with a notion that is seemingly contradictory: intentionally unintentional. These are activities that demand your attention, remain unproductive and allow your mind to explore without necessary control.
Art exemplifies this intentional unintentionality. Unless exceptionally technically gifted, an artist may sit in front of a canvas without necessarily knowing what’s going to end up on it. Certainly, this is evident in an artist such as Jackson Pollock, who experiments with paint splatters to build a composition. From personal experience (painting is a great activity for knit thinking), each brushstroke may turn out differently from what was intended, or the colour slightly different to what was expected. This process is often expressed by the artist through the materiality, as architect Louis khan famously asks, ‘what does a brick want to be?’. A painter (or I), may too ask, what does the painting want to be, as if it becomes emergent to the artist as they progress, as opposed to the artist manipulating the paint with clear intent. The intention of the artist is set when they sit in front of the canvas and pick up the brush, but what emerges on that canvas is often experimental, emergent and unintentional. In this way, the artist may be intentionally unintentional about their work. In addition, in the process and act of making, they create the space for intentionally unintentional thoughts. The medium is used as expression, and that expression is likely the result of the artist knit thinking. Unlike granny, who always expertly creates my next set of evening socks as intended, the artwork of an artist is the product of their intentional unintentionally of both thought and activity.
If I extend the analogy of the artist to everyday life, there are intentional spaces that create the right headspace for our minds to unintentionally learn what a thought needs to be. This process of ad-hoc discovery is not due to more effort or better logic but created through curating full attention spaces, free from productivity and control to see what emerges. This curation of spaces is more and more necessary as our attention is constantly being fought for, and our time so betrayed by the pursuit of productivity.
The value of knit thinking
The task at hand is not to all become artists, take up knitting or spend more time in spiritual buildings circumambulating. It’s about finding where these spaces exist for you and protecting them valiantly. I’ve come to personally value the need for knit thinking in my own life. It’s become something that I’ve had to introduce as a refusal to the status quo. To foster Granny’s knit thinking, I’ve had to create very intentional spaces to allow for unintentional thinking. These spaces are free from productivity, require my attention, and demand a lack of control. It’s not only a rebellion against the status quo of tech but a real interrogation of society itself. We are schooled from a young age reinforcing our beliefs, practising over and over, productive thinking; forever trying to get to the right answers. My life as a young professional has reinforced this, and with it growing insecurities and anxieties. Granny’s knit thinking is about practising something different, that feels completely counterintuitive in our modern context as a way to return to what’s fundamentally human.
We all know and have experienced knit thinking. But like breathing, it’s something we do so naturally that we haven’t given it much attention, and more worryingly haven't realised we’re slowly losing it. Bringing knit thinking into awareness and intention, I believe, can have a valuable impact on both the individual and the collective. The exact mechanism of how it’s impactful, and where that value will be experienced remains more of an art than a science. Here’s my take:
Individual: Knit thinking is a critical activity for us to ‘join the dots’, integrate our experiences and come closer to our intrinsic motivations. Without time to knit think, we’re too readily bought into extrinsic motivations- and ultimately lead a life that doesn’t quite suit us. The real intent here is to get closer to being more human, being more ourselves, in our day to day activities.
Collective: Our collective inability to sit without knowing, to give complex topics space free from productivity and to realise that to a large extent we lack control, are the reason our public dialogue takes the form of public debate. We’ve not practised these skills, and the defragmentation that we experience between groups in society is a symptom of this.
In pursuit of establishing where knit thinking can be valuable, in both the individual and collective, I’m setting up this little project that looks into various aspects of life where we need to practice this more.
To capture the type of thinking I’ve unpacked above, I’m boldly introducing a new English word- kniht. Pronounced knit. The word think backwards.
Kniht: (verb) The mental act of giving your full attention to unproductive, unintentional thinking, by intentionally creating spaces and activities for uncontrolled exploration.
- I need to go on a walk, I’ve got some knihting to do.
- Today, I’m taking a tech fast so that I can kniht.
Go on, kniht over it.