I recently read an article in the New York Times about the price we pay for allowing our minds to wander.

Titled, “When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Strays,” the piece looks at a study done by psychologists at Harvard University who used an iPhone app (trackyourhappiness) to track the happiness of the participants in the study.

The upshot of the study was this: the more you allow your mind to wander, the less happy you will be.

To that end, today I attempted to put this new (for me) knowledge to use and work at what I term mindful crochet.

One of the projects on my to-do list is a now belated birthday rug for my oldest son. As of this morning, I had the ten circles made and joined together with all ends woven in, but it was lacking a small something, and I determined that I had put that small something off long enough.

Armed with the knowledge that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, a 9.00mm hook, and what remained of the yarn I was using for the rug, I concentrated my efforts (and my mind) on the task of finishing this project. Hook in hand, it took me several tries to arrive at that small something that I felt was needed to finish the project, but I was reasonably (if not totally) successful at reigning in my wandering thoughts, and eventually made an addition of a small border which I felt gave the rug that small something that had previously been missing:

Being mindful did not help me get the work done faster, but it did allow me to see more quickly when something was not working, and I was less attached to the mistakes that I made and more willing to pull them out in a timely manner and move onto the next thing.

The rug still needs some ends woven in, and I won’t be able to block it until Wednesday when we are due for drier weather, but my experiment in mindful crochet seems to have been helpful in bringing me closer to the goal of finishing this unfinished project.