I knit a lot. As any knitter knows, one of the best stages is starting a new project, feeling up yarn and eyeing up daring or beloved colours, planning to expand your skills or enjoy the comfort of competence. You read patterns that include the amount of ‘ease’ in the garment. Ease, in this context, is the space between the clothing and the body. If the garment has to stretch to cover the skin, there is ‘negative ease’, which is what you want for socks and what some people want in a T-shirt. If there is space for the garment to move over the body, there is ‘positive ease’, and often, in knitwear, a surprising amount of positive ease is necessary for a sweater to hang well.
Like most women, I take different sizes of clothing from different shops. I try not to think about it, to choose the clothes that will allow me to move comfortably through my days without paying attention to the number on the label, but I am aware that there is often a causal relationship between outfits with more ease and easier days. It’s harder to have a good time, to be fully present in work, friendship, family life, when your waistband is causing stomach pain or your jeans are chafing sensitive areas.
The lesson, which I know but clearly haven’t quite learned, is that grace matters more than numbers when it comes to living well. (I have learned that ease matters in packing. You’ll have a better trip with a bag filled to no more than 80 per cent.)
I was travelling a lot earlier this year, on the road with a new book in between full-time teaching days. I enjoy both roles, but inevitably, like most of us, I end up rushing. Book tours are tightly timetabled; university terms stop for no one. I like to maximise events and activities. My instinct is usually to say yes, not out of grudging obligation or martyrdom but because I have energy and curiosity and I like people and places and journeys. I thrive on the hum of spinning plates, right up to the point where I don’t.
I reached a point where there had been too many early starts and late finishes, meals skipped, trains and planes caught by sprinting. I had been glad and occasionally smug about always wearing shoes in which I can run and carrying a backpack, not a suitcase. It had been exhilarating, and then exhausting.
[ How did ‘granny’ become the byword for dimness? That’s so wrongOpens in new window ]
Towards the end of a day on which a cancelled Eurostar was followed by delayed trains and a missing taxi and I arrived at a venue after I was supposed to be on stage, sweaty, exhausted, hungry, thirsty – having had to stand on a packed train when I was relying on being able to work, aware that I would now have to stay up into the early hours to complete the work despite another looming pre-dawn start – I wondered how it might be to bring the idea of ease from knitting into daily life.
I suspect that ease is a state of mind as much as a matter of logistics, that the driven mind will stretch any fabric to its maximum extension
Ease is not always possible – timetables need to run, businesses have good reasons for wanting work travel to be efficient, all forms of transport are prone to disruption – but it begins to feel necessary.
There must be small opportunities to add a little growing room, perhaps even thriving room, to most days. It should be possible, for most of us most of the time, to wear our days and hours with a little positive ease.
It’s not easy to find ease, not encouraged. Ease is the opposite of optimisation and striving. It doesn’t have to cost anything, not even much time.
I suspect that it’s a state of mind as much as a matter of logistics, that the driven mind will stretch any fabric to its maximum extension, which is precisely where late-stage capitalism wants us to be: fraught, taut, surviving in a scarcity narrative which is always rooted in inequitable distribution rather than shortage of supply. Look in the State’s coffers, at all the empty dwellings, at the food thrown away. There is enough to go around. With different and better social structures, we could all have some ease, but most of us, in small ways, probably can now.
Resist where you can. Hold space to grow, to breathe, to digest.