Yesterday I was knitting a sock and came to a thin piece of yarn. The yarn has been in storage for years and had gotten damaged. I thought we had pulled off all the damaged section before I got started, so I thought I could work this one little strip in and continue on. After several rows, there was one area so thin that it looked like the sock has already been worn…a lot. I either needed to unwind the yarn until I had removed the rest of the damage and start the sock over, or I needed to TINK back before the worn area and cut the yarn and add the skein back where the yarn is stronger. Neither option appealed to me, so I decided to put the project aside.
Next I picked up an afghan square from a project I have been working on a long time. I read the instructions again to refresh my memory and started working. The first few rows went well, and then I got to the tricky part of the pattern. I misread the instructions and by the time I realized it, I was unsure how to TINK back to redo it. I put that project back in the bag.
I decided to quit for the day and get help before the issue required more work to repair. I’m not sure why I kept working on the first project. Maybe it was because I knew if I asked for help, I probably wouldn’t like the answer, so I tried to plow ahead and pretend there wasn’t a problem. Hiding my head in the sand couldn’t keep me from seeing the issue a few rows down the road. I learned my lesson on the second project, stopping before I made the issue worse.
Sometimes we just need to stop and reevaluate the situation before we plow ahead. We may need to ask for assistance and then be prepared to do the work necessary to make something right before we move ahead, whether it is a knitting project, a relationship, or our spiritual health. Otherwise, we will find ourselves backtracking to the point in the road where it all went wrong in the first place, wasting a lot of time and energy in the process.