Having the rug pulled from under your feet – a crochet needle to the rescue!

High 5, low 5, baby 5 🖐️

It’s mind-bogglingly odd how, even when confronted with an unexpected and violent death, life goes on. Your mental map and world view may be shaken, smudged and smeared beyond recognition – but the earth is still turning and you somehow still feel the urge to eat, sleep and yell at the neighbours because of their barking dog and blaring alarm.

My 32-year-old cousin was murdered over the weekend. This in itself is terrible and heart-wrenching. But this is my aunt and uncle’s second child to die much too early. [Their firstborn passed away in a motor car accident in 2009 at age 19.]

One is left with a truck full of questions about the way life works.

Keeping my hands busy with the familiar feel of the crochet needle in one and wool in the other, helped to quiet my mind a bit.

A fivesome grannies

These grannies are being incorporated into a larger whole. And as I didn’t work with a pattern or a plan – I just kept my hands busy – I’ve now taken over the living room floor to pack them all out to see how to best combine them.

Diagonal rows of colour? Maybe not.

Groups of four? Maybe.

Take five!

Here are some suggestions for taking a break from real life:

With 5-letter word games

Have you tried Wordle? Or the Afrikaans version, Wortel?

With music

• Dolly Parton’s Working 9 to 5

• Beethoven’s 5th symphony

• Pentatonix singing A little space with the Korean group, ATEEZ.

With movies

These are all series that consist of 5 movies each:

• Indiana Jones (professor of archaeology with a whip)

• Rambo (Vietnam War veteran against evil forces)

• Die Hard (street-smart cop saving the day)

• Jason Bourne (CIA assassin with amnesia righting wrongs)

• The Twilight Saga (vampires and werewolves doing what they do)

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Five exclamation marks!!!!!

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
~ Terry Pratchett

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Terry Pratchett happens to be one of my favourite writers. When I just started working I lived in a bachelor’s flat in Sunnyside, Pretoria. On the Friday after pay day [public servants get paid on the 15th ], I would walk around in Sunnypark and inevitably buy myself a Terry Pratchett at the CNA [in those days a book cost around R27,00!] and a big packet of chips and a little lemon cheesecake dessert from Woollies.

Here’s another quote from Terry Pratchett that I found in James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter this week, about the ripples we leave when we die:

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away,
until the clock wound up winds down,
until the wine she made has finished its ferment,
until the crop they planted is harvested.
The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.
~ Terry Pratchett in Reaper Man

That’s it.

I’ll leave you with the words from a loving-kindness meditation I once did:

May you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering.

D