The typical image of a knitter(编织者) may be a white-haired lady but in the 1940s, young male Royal Air Force pilots used needles as they waited for their next mission. Wartime pilots crashed a lot and knitting helped rebuild flexibility in wounded limbs (四肢) and meanwhile settle wounded minds. They were the basis of early occupational therapy.
Today, millions of people around the world employ the same technique. Occupational therapist Jill Riley was part of a team from Cardiff University that surveyed more than 3,500 knitters and found that the more frequently people knitted, the calmer and happier they felt. As one person surveyed put it, "That rhythm of making stitch (针脚) after stitch is like deep breathing. It's a flow where you don't have to stress about it and you've got the rhythm happening. "
"Flow" is a concept first named by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. As he wrote in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, The best moments in our lives are not the passive or relaxing times. The best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. " An artist, Shauna Richardson, knows just how true this is. The artist spent 18 months in a state of flow when she knitted three seven-metre-long lions for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. To complete the task, she says she had to concentrate all her attention and keep a state of mind driven by rhythm and process.
Csikszentmihalyi also describes the opposite to flow. He points out that although people are healthier and live longer, they often end up feeling anxious and bored and cut off from satisfying work. Because knitting is so accessible - at its heart it's two sticks and one stitch-it helps people build confidence in their abilities. After all, if you make a mistake, you can just pull it all out and start again.
