Yesterday, as friends and family participated at the Women’s March on Washington, I was fortunate to receive moving messages and texts throughout the momentous proceedings. Regardless of one’s political stand, it was an impressive rally to remind our government of its role to serve all the people of our great country. And in a democracy, when civil liberties are threatened, we have fundamental rights and a responsibility to speak and be heard.

I looked upon a sea of pink hats, thinking about the determination that went into each stitch. Very symbolic when considering the definition of knitting is to become closely and firmly joined together, as did happen yesterday when well over a million people gathered across the nation to speak in a voice of unity against hate and for human rights and equality.

Although the project was originally intended to send a specific message to our new president, I couldn’t help but think of a deeper significance to those knitted hats. As a knitter, I was reminded of a cautionary lesson the craft has taught me. To borrow a Goodreads quote from Lani Diane Rich, The Fortune Quilt: “When you knit, if you get something wrong and keep knitting, then when you discover it, you have to rip out all those rows of stitching to go back and fix it. Life is like that. Sometimes, it has to rip out all the stitches to go back and fix what’s wrong.”

It’s a simplistic analogy in that dropping a stitch, although annoying as hell, is not a life-changing concern. Whereas mistakes in leading a country can have lasting and devastating costs attached. Which leads me to the second knitting metaphor those hats brought to mind. Just as many stitches went into their creation, they serve as a reminder of the many qualities that are woven into the makeup of a great leader: wisdom and good judgment; openness, tolerance, compassion and respect for all; humility, teachability, accountability and magnanimity; caution, self-discipline, focus and composure; courage, honesty and integrity; the capacity to cooperate, collaborate, motivate and to inspire trust; a master of the art of communication.

Few possess all these qualities, but history has demonstrated that exceptional leaders held a deep respect for the influential substance of words. For what wields more power than what we speak or what we write? Words can be the instruments of greatness, inspiration, progress…or they can be the weapons of divisiveness, disorder and destruction.

We should all be mindful of the intensity of their influence. But our leaders have a duty to use language wisely, to choose their words with the same careful deliberation and forethought as their actions.