In the morning, my cat sleeps in one room. After lunch, he sleeps in another. On his way to his food, he must–he absolutely must–walk the long way around. Every day is like this. Why? I don’t know. It’s just what he does.

Since the pandemic forced us all inside, like many people, I’ve taken up a routine of evening creative projects–mostly hand spinning and knitting. And wow, talk about repetitive. A lot of hand spinning is drawing unspun wool or another animal fiber away from the spinning wheel as it twists and then drawing it towards the spinning wheel to wind it onto a bobbin. That’s it. Over and over and over. A lot of knitting is similar–the same stitch over and over and over.

I like doing these things. I take great stock in them. And like my cat on the way to his supper bowl, I feel compelled to do them a certain way. And I know I am not alone.

But why, why, why do we do these repetitive things? It’s not to save money. Any knitter will tell you that their supply stash alone has cost them more than they want to admit. It’s not to save time. It takes months to years to go from sheep to shawl. It can’t even be about utility–I’ve spun up way more yarn than I’ll ever use. I finish one skein and I start another. And then another.

It’s just what I do. But why?

Back to my cat. I think we do these things because–like my cat’s daily routine–there’s value in the doing. It’s not always about the getting, the arriving, the finishing. Pandemic life has given me some space to lean into a wonderful set of routines, and the doing has taught me that I’ve been over-focused on the product, the target, the goal.

Zen Buddhists have a practice called kinhin. Essentially, it’s walking without the need to get anywhere. Now, why would anyone do that? Because there’s value in losing yourself in a repetitive task. There’s value in doing a task we take for granted–plain old ordinary walking–and feeling it, living it, enacting it apart from its end goal, the destination. In other words, there’s value in drawing the yarn away for the twist that somehow transcends the value of the finished yarn.

When you can lose yourself within the repetitive doing, you begin to gain a richness, a heightened sense, perhaps, of what it means to be alive. There really is no place to go. Nothing to gain. No measure to mark. We draw the yarn. We release the yarn. We draw again.