Today is the 5th anniversary of my blog. In the past five years I have gone through many, many personal changes, pauses and reflections, times of turmoil and despair, and feelings of exhalation and joy. So has the world. Though I have many wonderful solely knitting posts to come (Rhinebeck, Creature Comforts Cardi pics), this week I was reflecting on the interconnection between all of us.

I got the opportunity to go to the Times Square protest last Saturday, part of Occupy Wall Street, and I was overwhelmed by a spirit of unity and revolution. Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I feel immensely grateful to live in a time where we are on the verge of many social and economic changes in the world. I am hopeful. I feel that my generation is full of individuals that want to make this world a better place, despite claims that we are full of apathy. I think that could be said about any generation. Some want to change things, some don’t care.

I was thinking about knitting as a metaphor for all of this. (Imagine that.) In the movie I Heart Huckabees, the character Bernard Jaffe (played by Dustin Hoffman) talks about “the blanket thing” meaning that we are all interconnected. Well, of course, I’d like to think of this blanket as being a knitted blanket, because that encompasses an additional level of interconnectedness: loops. Knitting is made up of loop after loop, connected as we patiently make them one by one. Our world/universe is very similar. We form it through our actions, all connected to each other and the things we do as individuals contributing to a whole. It’s hard to feel important as a single loop in this giant system, but if you imagine that the single loop is gone, or destroyed, it impacts the area (or individuals) around it. It causes a tear or run, and this in turn can have a greater effect. We can also build great things through these loops, making physical shapes or patterns, just as human beings we can create, evolve, and shape our world.

I think it’s important to recognize that we DO as singular individuals have an impact on those around us and we can choose to make that a negative or positive one. This can be as simple as choosing to behave in more environmentally sound ways to stop contributing to the massive environmental changes, helping a neighbor in need, speaking out about injustice to help others become more aware, trying to have empathy for the lives of those that are so drastically different from our own, or being one of the loops in the hundreds of thousands that are standing up to make others aware of the economic injustice and inequality we are facing right now. When we work together, knitting the blanket and shaping our world, we can make great changes. We can build a new world.