When traveling, I often enjoy the journey almost as much as the destination. If the journey involves a car, I just need the right soundtrack and snack food and I’m more than happy to go along for the ride. If it involves a ship, once we get past the safety orientation I’m all aboard and even a day or two at sea can be enjoyed by attending the talks, stepping into the casino, or sitting in a lounge chair by a window with a beverage, watching the waves go by. And if it involves a plane? Oh, if it involves a plane my enjoyment reaches a new level! I love flying. I don’t mind the lineups to check in or for security, or the waiting to pick up my bag at the end. My enjoyment is sometimes tempered by cramped leg room or someone who spends the entire flight with their chair fully back, but these succeed only in bringing my enjoyment down a notch or two and are not enough to completely overshadow my glee. My favourite part is the take-off: there’s just something awe-inspiring about getting a plane into the air. Hopefully, one day we will try traveling by train as I feel that too will have its own perks.

But, lately when knitting, I’m all about the destination. Sure, the planning part is very fun – caressing all the beautiful yarns, deciding on the right yarn and colour, finding just the right pattern for the yarn (or designing a pattern, if it’s one I’m doing myself) – but once I get past that I’m beginning to find that I run out of drive. Sometimes, even with all the groundwork done, I delay a project because I just don’t want to cast on. And the actual knitting? Sometimes … well, sometimes it feels a bit like a chore. Sure, there are things like lace, cables, and pattern work to keep me on my toes, but sometimes I can’t seem to enjoy those as much as I probably should. Instead, I’m wishing that I was done, rather than enjoying what I am doing. Payoff over process. Sometimes I get so close to the end, only to be bogged down by the finishing steps like seaming and weaving in yarn ends, that my progress slows to a crawl, further dampening my interest.

It never used to be like that though – I used to enjoy the process of knitting more than I seem to now. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy knitting an awful lot, I guess I’m just finding that the particular aspects of what I enjoy are changing. I’m not sure if it is just the sheer amount of knitting I do, or perhaps the amount of knitting I do for people other than me that has changed my perspective on it. Whatever the case, I want to enjoy the journey again, as well as the destination.

We only go on a few trips a year, and even when I was traveling for work it was only every few months, so traveling never really gets old for me, but I usually knit three to four dog sweaters a month from November through to March, and then I have had large projects on the go over each of the summers for the last few years.

So, since this is our year of Zen, I’m going to work on enjoying the process of knitting again. ‘Cuz, really, one should be Zen when wielding a pair of large, pointy sticks.