The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times

by Michelle Obama

What’s perhaps strange to say is that I’m not sure I would have gotten there without the period of enforced stillness and the steadiness I found inside of knitting. I’d had to go small in order to think big again. Shaken by the enormity of everything that was happening, I’d needed my hands to reintroduce me to what was good, simple, and accomplishable. And that turned out to be a lot. I now knit while talking to my mom on the phone, during Zoom meetings with my team from the office, and on summer afternoons when friends come to sit on our back patio. Knitting has made watching the evening news a little less stressful. It has made certain hours of the day less lonely, and it’s helped me think more reasonably about the future. I’m not here to tell you that knitting is a cure for anything. It won’t end racism or demolish a virus or vanquish depression. It won’t create a just world or slow climate change or heal anything big that’s broken. It’s too small for that. It’s so small that it hardly seems to matter. And this is part of my point. I’ve come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it. When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small. On days when my brain apprehends nothing but monolithic catastrophe and doom, when I feel paralyzed by not-enoughness a...