This is the time of year that asks us to take stock. It’s built into the calendar: today the end of Q1, we recently marked the beginning of spring, and erev Passover is tomorrow. The daffodils are starting and there are bunnies everywhere. It feels like the right moment to look up from the work and see where we are.

When I launched the Thursday afternoon group in January, I had a shape in my head of what it might be. A small group, a comfortable space, people working on their own projects, some troubleshooting, some company. That part turned out to be true.

What I didn’t expect was how different it would feel from my other group, in a good way.

On Thursday mornings, I also help facilitate a blanket knitting group through and at my synagogue. That group has been running longer, nearly everyone knows each other and has for longer than I’ve known them, the project is defined, and there’s a particular kind of warmth that comes from a group with shared history and shared purpose. It hums. It knows what it is.

The afternoon group is not the same. We rotate among members’ houses. Each attendee comes with their own projects, a range of skill levels, varied goals and reasons for attending. Some are working through a pattern that’s giving them trouble. Some just want company and quiet. Some are figuring out whether they even like crochet, which is completely legitimate. What I’ve found is that the group needs more flexibility than I anticipated, and also more room to simply exist without agenda. And that means I need to find ways to adapt and run with what’s in front of me in the present moment.

People often need exactly the help they came for. It turns out that’s not their entire story.

A student arrives with a tangled mess of ends and leaves learning a new way to carry yarn for stripes. Someone sits down intending to finish a seam and talks through why the project stopped feeling good, and then they try on their new sweater and love it. The technical question is usually the door. What’s behind it is something more interesting: what am I actually trying to make, and why does it matter to me?

I don’t always have the answer. I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

This week we’re pausing. Erev Pesach is tomorrow, and with it comes the turning of the house, the clearing out, the preparation for something that asks us to stop and remember and retell. It feels like the right moment to take stock, which is very much the work of this season. What’s still useful, what can go, what we’re carrying forward.

It’s been a heavy few weeks for our family. My father-in-law passed recently, and we are still in the early, strange days of recalibrating. Grief has its own rhythm. I’ve been leaning on the things I know: showing up, making things with my hands (including second night Seder), being useful where I can. That’s how I honor the people I’ve lost. Not by stopping though I’m more accepting of pauses (and snuggles with the cat), but by carrying the work forward, changed by it.

Both groups will be on hiatus for the next two weeks. We’ll be back the week of April 13th. I’ll be back. I’m holding two truths about myself at once: a little different, and the same.

Chag sameach to those who are celebrating. For everyone: may this season bring some quiet, some sweetness, and room to start something new.