Relaxation--Are you active, or passive?

Yvonne Lindsay
Deborah Hillman Photograpy

We have an advertisement on our televisions here in New Zealand, where a high profile sportsman talks about being an active relaxer. That is, to relax he needs to be doing something, like going for a swim or cooking, etc. It's got me to thinking about how I relax and I've discovered that far from being the total couch potato I'd always thought I was, I'm kind of an active relaxer, too.

A few years ago I took up knitting again because just sitting and watching TV in the evening stopped being fun and, because I'm also into instant gratificiation :-) I picked socks as my project of choice. Enter the wonders of Ravelry.com, a free site for knitters and crocheters (I'm NZYvonne on there if you want to look up some of the socks I've done.) What a treasure trove of patterns and ideas.

I've found that I love to work with colour, so hand dyed merino-blend yarns are an absolute delight for me. Colours make my brain happy, doing something useful in a time of relaxation makes my brain happy, seeing a project completed in a reasonably short period of time makes my brain very happy. That said, for Mr Fix-It, I do stick to his preferred (yawn) navy, grey or black. Everything in me rebels at working with the plainer tones but that's tempered with the fact that I'm making socks, with love, for the man I love.

My eldest daughter, The Drill Sergeant, has recently joined me in knitting as a relaxation (except we won't talk about the 13 attempts it took to get her most recent beanie completed, or how relaxing it may or may have not been, LOL!) We've both found knitting to be a mental time out, whether we're thinking about other stuff or just letting our minds wander or even if we're just (okay, that's me) obsessively following the pattern. Either way, we've both found it beneficial, and I've also found that my creative writing juices flow more evenly during the days following an evening of knitting.

I think I've always been an active relaxer, certainly since I've had my two gorgeous girls. Initially it was cross-stitch and floral design, more recently mosaics and quilting (hey, I didn't realise it but they essentially go hand in hand, don't they? Piecing bits and pieces of colour together to make pretty pictures?) and latterly, knitting.

How about you? Are you an active relaxer or are you blissfully happy to do nothing at all in those precious moments when you are able to do nothing at all. Share your thoughts with me and I'll put you in a draw for one commenter to win one of my backlist books (stock permitting.) And, if your native tongue is a different language to English, and if I have a foreign edition in that language, you have a choice of an English or foreign edition ~~ Yvonne Lindsay