A finger trap for the wary (and weary)

I’ve been thinking a lot about finger traps. You know the kind?

You insert your fingers in either end—or borrow a friend’s finger for the other side, even more fun. The more you struggle to escape the trap, the tighter it binds you. The more you stretch and pull at it, the more it stretches and pulls at you back.

But if you release and relax, if you allow slack and work with the trap’s natural movement, you escape easily. The trap falls off your fingers without any effort at all.

My duvet cover is like this, too. The other day, it came out of the dryer all wadded up, still damp in the places where it had turned into a ball, and tied onto itself in dozens of places, some deep within the rats nest of its bundled state—much like my thoughts some days.

I really love my duvet. And I really hate putting it on the bed. I wanted the thing detangled NOW so the chore could be over. I started pulling at the ends I could see. But, the more I pulled on it, the tighter I made the knots. I kept pulling anyway, and could see the knots pulling right back.

I sighed, fully frustrated, and threw the thing onto my kitchen counter where I have the most working space at waist level. It loosened a little as it landed. I picked it up by one of its knotted pieces and shook it, lightly lightly. It loosened up more. I reached into the bundled mess and created some slack in the fabric. It started to unravel. I started to work with the slack, ignoring the areas that were still tight in knots. It gave way until it was smoothing out in even the most tangled places. From there, the rest of it was easy to pull apart.

“It’s like a finger trap,” I remember saying to the dog, who was watching me. My 90s childhood was full of finger traps, for some reason.

And it was at that moment that I realized I had been performing a metaphor for certain other situations in my life.

Things I was trying to force in the opposite direction of their reality were causing me stress and continued stuck-ness.

And every time I accepted the reality of things—what was working versus not working, where I was celebrated versus where I was not, what filled my cup versus what did not—I created slack that allowed for clear next moves and things moving along easily.

By accepting, I don’t mean I rolled over over and let everyone (including myself) treat me unfairly. When my duvet was fighting me, I didn’t just let it win. I didn’t throw it on the bed in a bundle and try to crawl under it that night for warmth I knew it couldn’t give me.

I mean that I accepted the reality of the situations that I was in. With my duvet, I accepted that it was a balled up, knotted, frustrating mess. That it was not suitable for comfort and peace in its tangled state. That it was not at that moment delivering on its promise of being something that offers ease and beauty and support to my life.

Only then could I take that deep breath that sounded a lot like a big sigh and start working with pockets of slack that naturally presented themselves, rather than trying to pull and force against the parts that weren’t ready to cooperate yet.

Obviously, relationships (the ones with ourselves and the ones with other people) are a lot more complex than a duvet cover. The places of slack and ease present themselves in more abstract ways in real life. The places of resistance and knots are harder to acknowledge when we want them to be smoothed out already.

But we still encounter actual resistance in places we try to force that aren’t aligned, and we still encounter very real ease and flow in places that are ready to work with us.

And, if you have ever owned a duvet, you know that sometimes your brain actually cannot tell the difference between a full-on drag-out emotional fight and the fight of having to stuff the thing back into its cover.