Trust

According to my reliable Merriam-Webster, trust is defined as "assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something."

What I'm finding, as I gain more experience in life, is that the list of people and things I can truly trust is growing shorter and shorter. I find myself questioning why that may be. Am I more jaded? More realistic? Besides counting on the sun rising and setting each day, the love of my kids and family members, and eventual death, there are only couple of other constants.

I have a circle of true friends I can count on for the truth, no matter what. They will always be my friends, no matter what. They've been with with me through thick and thin, good times and bad, without judgement. Those friends know that above all else, I value the truth, even if it's going to hurt for a little while. And they know why. Even one of the lessons my dad taught me as a kid still sticks with me today, a quote from Ben Franklin: It takes far fewer words to tell the truth. These friends I can trust.

Life experiences have taught me I can count on myself. I can trust myself and my intuition. This is huge. For a big part of my life I didn't have the confidence to do this, and would second-guess myself and my actions, or sit idly by and let life happen to me. It took a long time to learn I could count on myself. It took even longer to learn that I had to tell people I can't trust to go away, even if I still care about them.

Lastly, I can trust knitting. Follow the pattern. Form the stitches. Make something beautiful from sticks and string. Even better, if something goes wrong, if a mistake is made, I can rip it back to the bad part and do it over; make it right. (Too bad life doesn't work that way!) Example: My sock in progress, which I started over 3 times... or was it four?

Follow the pattern. If I get stuck, I can ask anyone in the knitting community - online or at my LYS - and get an answer to get me back on track. Not only that, I can receive encouragement and support to keep me going; sometimes far more than I ever anticipated! I can trust the knitting to work. I can trust people to have answers. From experience over the past two years, since I first took up the pointed needles, I can trust that the rhythmic motion of forming stitches will serve as a form of meditation for me when I am troubled... with the end result being something lovely for someone else. Example: Super Quick Baby Socks. (I purposely made them not match by using variegated yarn which would be stripes on a big project - Caron Shadows.)