Shouldn't…but Do

In a home office is an old window blind, the kind with pull strings not as commonly sold these days.  

In the pull strings of the blind is a knot, or rather, a complex of knots so unsalvageable and large that it has been left for years and used as the pull for the blind itself.  I cannot recall how the knot started, but it must have involved strings roughened with time and out of place, perhaps pulled too tight, that crossed themselves, and the condition compounded from there.

One definition of the word “knot” in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary reads, “an intertwining of rope, string, or flexible fabric to form a secure fastening or an obstruction when drawn tight.”  There are many kinds of purposeful knots that keep things together. And there are accidental knots that do the same thing. It is a matter of perspective whether a knot has a purpose or is an obstruction.  Sometimes obstructing knots, like traffic jams, an unhappy marriage, or circuitous solutions applied against formidable problems, can be seen as purposeful with enough distance.  And, sometimes not.

Tangles

With time, knots can slowly compound, binding tension, flesh, emotion, and spirit.

Many knots are limiting, constraining grief, sorrow, memory, and joy just as a poorly placed dam contorts and defers the natural path of a life-giving river. Never named, the depth and entrenched tangle of these knots discourages exploration and exposure. Like the knot in the strings of my window blind, they are weakly useful, sometimes mistaken for a misbegotten character trait, full of fate and empty of feeling. The knot becomes a facade, claiming the life of the strings, leaving them mute and immobile.

Years in the making, these knots are often hidden until the greater life story has passed. If the impasse of the knot is ever realized, by design, it is too late to be of any outer-worldly consequence.  Like the greatest of riddles, tricks, and turns, the unbinding of these knots beckons to a path of magnificent interiority. The type that calls out the fraud of concretized self-knowledge while presenting a challenge that is easy for most to ignore, but impossible for others to set aside.

 For those few, it is tedious to work the knot, carefully, slowly, separating threads in a pure act of patience without promise of immediate—or any—reward. Observe how the strings twisted when held in place so long, lost flexibility, utility, and admitted to being unable to do what it was they were here to do.

When finally free, the strings hold the form of their capture. It is unclear if their deformity will ever truly hang out. They bear their time captured in the knot soulfully, even as they regain the ability to work to their own task once again.  The patience required to release the knot is only realized when the task is complete.

At inception, sometimes decades ago, there was no time or patience to separate the threads, or smooth the strings from tangling and becoming trapped. A knot takes on the job of holding neglected things, in its obstructive way, carrying the energy of a tangle that cannot be touched until the right time.

The meaning is in the doing, the plodding revisiting of squinting perspective, of endlessly working a hopelessly tight juncture, and then, like opening into the center of a labyrinth, pulling a string which begins the unbinding.  As each chronically twisted ligature is straightened, less energy is bound, the journey speeds, and tempered freedom is gained.

The strings of the blind now pull and release, almost as well as they did before. Ordinary, to say the least.