Lessons from knitting socks

I've been knitting since I was 10 (thanks for teaching me, Mom!), but socks have always seemed mysterious and impossibly difficult. At the same time, there's always been this wish of mine to learn to make them. Kind of a "if I can knit this, I can knit anything" mentality.

So two years ago, Mom and I got matching sock pattern books for Christmas and I started to knit. Last Christmas, I had maybe an inch worth of sock cuff done. Here's where I'm at now. First on my foot (I promise those knitting needles aren't puncturing any foot tissue):

Then off the foot so you can see the pattern:

As I was working on the main part of the sock, I kept looking ahead to the pattern directions and thinking, "How in the world am I going to figure out how to do the heel? That part of the pattern makes absolutely NO SENSE!" Mom couldn't remember how to turn a heel, so I looked online for some help. The main message I got from every sock site was "trust the pattern, even if you don't see how it can work."

So I got to the heel and started following the pattern directions. I had to take out a whole section and try again after I realized after the fact what part of the directions were really saying, but it worked. I knit and knit and thought, "Nope, this won't work," and then all of a sudden, it did! Who woulda thunk it? Those crazy pattern designers know what they're doing after all.

Then I thought bigger. How many times does the pattern make absolutely no sense to me and I try to make my own version that I think will work even though I don't know what I'm doing? I see something happening in my life and think, "Nope, this won't work" or "Why would I move in that direction instead of this one?" It comes back to trusting the pattern. Or rather, trusting the pattern designer. My job is to knit and follow the directions.

I can do that. And maybe next Christmas I'll have one sock done of the pair.