I have previously written about envisioning life as a tapestry, full of color – mine mostly muted reds, greens, golds and black. It is a series of threads, some as thin as silk and others as heavy as a super bulky length
of wool.

The threads weave together creating an illustration of your life.  Sometimes there are gaps or holes that you see and stitch together or miss completely and remain empty.  Other times there are giant knots of thread that have to be, often painfully, unwound in order to keep weaving the tapestry.  If not, they will clog up the process making it almost impossible to weave another thread into the mix without first ramming the needle through with a sledge hammer.

There is obvious symbolism in this tapestry image.  A particularly gaping hole might mean, you’d better back it up a bit and remember where you are going because you surely must have missed a step.  Or a giant knot might mean, ‘holy shit what load of crap have I stumbled into that I cannot shove out of the way no matter how huge my shovel’.

Then there is my personal favorite – the thread that never seems to end up attached to anything.  It just flies around frantically circling the tapestry with no apparent source or destination. When I imagine this thread all I can see is this guy.

In some ways I can almost see every thread as a person. Someone who has stepped into my life and left a mark on the path of it. So, maybe this guy isn’t me at all but someone who keeps waving and jumping up and down until I see them, maybe let them in, and receive the message they are trying to deliver.

That might be true and I can certainly say that I am pretty damn good at ignoring even the most obvious of signs.  Even so, I’m pretty sure I actually look like this guy some days as I jump around from kitchen sink to desk to mailbox to laundry to workout to shower, back to desk to whatever else is next in line – it’s endless really.  Anyone who is a mom knows what I’m talking about. We can do a minimum of 5 things at once.  Make the bed while brushing your teeth and quizzing your son for his pending driving test, then running to turn the stove off so the scrambled eggs you started 5 minutes ago won’t burn the house down. But I digress….

I think any way I slice it, these holes, knots and loose ends are signs of my inability to move forward – to get the message placed squarely in front of my face and move on down the road.

So many people talk about how important it is to just “live in the moment” – to just be still and not endlessly brood over your past blunders or anticipate the next moment, day, year, event . . . .  Well, this unhinged thread is the epitome of NOT living in the moment.  Or at least of having a damn hard time latching onto it.  I long for those rare times that I actually DO stop, look around, look within and just “be exactly where I am”.  These are moments of pure peace and stillness and they are magic.  Few and far between but magic nonetheless.

The flip side to living in the moment, and where you can usually find me, is waiting. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for something to stop happening. Waiting for the next day to begin. Waiting for my real life to begin – for something to happen that will explain everything.  In this magic moment that eludes me, all the puzzle pieces will find their match and create a near perfect mural. The frenzied thread will stop its flippant spinning and settle down.  My tapestry will smooth at the edges, all the threads will align and it will look like a beautiful landscape.

Hmmmmmmm. Maybe. Or maybe not.

I think that in times of frenzy or conversely in times of immobility, it is human nature to search for the one thread that is within reach in order to create order out of chaos.  While I feel like I am almost ALWAYS in one or another of those places, I recently found myself grabbing on and yanking one out.  As is typical, yanking on one means all those attached come with it.  And then what you have is an unravelled mess of thread at your feet.  And while the disorder of that mess makes me crazy and become like the flailing guy above, it also forces me to take stock of each thread and try to put them in an order that fits – that makes sense at least in that moment.  Last week I had an ” I think I have to actually pull that one little thread out.  RIGHT NOW.”  This just happened to be in the middle of an early morning ride at my cycling studio – a place where these moments often occur. (@cyclefierce).  It must have something to do with endorphins and sweat. 

This was a special ride with a special playlist.  One that I LOVE and could listen to over and over.  It was during a particular song, a song that my daughter and I have always loved, when I noticed the tangled mess of thread on the floor beside my bike.  I tried to look away, but it seemed to grow until I almost couldn’t see the instructor.  So, I picked up a particularly large piece of wool (in my mind of course) and while I wound it around and around my finger I started thinking about this post and the idea of waiting.  Maybe that’s what that particular fat strand of wool represents.  My giant waiting room.

While sitting in that room – on my bike – with my massive pile of thread beside me, I thought that the idea of waiting for the perfect answer, event or moment really is a mind fuck.  Because the truth is there is NOTHING to wait for.  There is no magic explanation or idea that will put everything into the perfect position or the wheels in motion.  There is no one thing that will magically create peace out of disorder.  There is no one person who will suddenly toss the fundamental answer to the mystery of your life into your waiting hands.  The mystery IS the answer and we are living it all day – every day – every moment.  And let’s face it we don’t know how many moments we actually have.  Why on earth am I wasting them waiting for the next one that will “mean more, be more significant, be perfect”.  Now is what matters.  This moment and this thread.

My imperfect tapestry is perfect just as it is, crazy flying threads and all.  Life is made of all these threads – we add them, knot them, cut them out, scramble the order of them with every person we let in, every thought we acknowledge and action we take.  Maybe the holes and knots are meaningful in and of themselves. They are the moments of my life that – for good or maybe not so good – have brought me to the next thread – even if I’ve had to jump over some to get there.

I imagine that this theme is just a repetition of my earlier Tapestry post. And how perfect is that?  Here it is.  Another thread in my tapestry that looks like a frighteningly similar version of one that is 25 rows above.  Or more likely several that are scattered throughout.  Maybe what didn’t stick in my sometimes thick mind from the other threads, is here again to bring home the message.  Maybe this time it will sink in and my waiting room will become my party room instead.