The Magic of Doing It Now

After eight wonderfully busy days of hosting another of my knitting tours, today I am home.

There’s something deeply satisfying about returning to the rhythm of ordinary life.

This morning I’ve been washing woollen blankets, picking raspberries from the polytunnel, cutting rhubarb from the garden ready for jam, and pottering from one small job to the next.

At one point, while shaking out some of our sheepskins, I noticed a large tear in one of them.

For a moment I almost did what I usually do. I could have left it for another day, adding it to the ever-growing mental list of things that need doing. I could have thought, There’s no time for this, or wondered whether I should look up the “proper” way to repair it.

Instead, I looked for a needle and thread.

Five minutes later, it was mended.

Not perfectly. But well enough to give it many more years of life.

It struck me that so much of life is like this.

Somewhere along the way, we have become hesitant. Less confident in our skills. We convince ourselves we need more knowledge, more confidence, more time or the right equipment before we begin.

We forget that most skills are learned by doing, not by waiting.

Jam doesn’t appear because you have found the perfect recipe. It appears because you wash the fruit, put a pan on the stove, add sugar and see what happens.

A tear doesn’t repair itself because you have watched another video. It gets better because you pick up a needle.

Confidence rarely arrives before we start. More often, it quietly follows afterwards.

Today has reminded me how satisfying it is to reduce the distance between noticing something and doing something about it.

The berries were ripe today, so I picked them.

The blankets could dry in the sunshine and gentle breeze, so I washed them.

The sheepskin had a tear, so I mended it.

None of these jobs were remarkable. None will change the world. But together they created that lovely feeling of being present in my own life, rather than always chasing after a mental list of things still waiting to be done.

Perhaps that is what living in the present really looks like.

Not dramatic moments of mindfulness or grand resolutions, but simply paying attention to what is in front of us and responding when we can.

And in the afternoon I took my tea and a toasted second-day croissant with apricot jam outside and let the sun kiss my face. It felt like a tiny celebration of the day. So special.

How often do we postpone these simple pleasures, waiting for the “right” time?

There is a quiet confidence that grows every time we give something a go. Not because we know we will get it right, but because we discover that we are capable of figuring things out.

As I write this, a pan of chopped rhubarb and blackcurrants is waiting to gently bubble on the stove, ready to be transformed into a lovely preserve that we will savour throughout the winter, remembering this particular blissfully joyful Shetland summer day.

It hasn’t been an extraordinary day.

Just an ordinary one, lived with my hands busy and my mind settled.

Perhaps the real magic was not simply in doing things now. Perhaps it was in giving myself this day with nowhere else to be and nothing else to worry about.

A day to live slowly.

A day to mend.

A day to rebalance.

A day to pick berries before they became overripe, wash blankets while the sun was shining, and enjoy the quiet pleasure of being at home surrounded by the things I love.

None of it was expensive. None of it required escaping somewhere beautiful or searching for something more.

It simply required time, peace and the willingness to begin.

And perhaps that is the true magic of doing it now.