My Hands, My Heart

There’s something about contemplating your hands that is profoundly grounding. They’re such a delicate part of your body, when you think how easily they can be injured for instance. Yet they do such monumental tasks every day. The phrase “prepared with loving hands” comes to mind, and the first picture in my head is: meals. But it's not just the pretty pancakes, pastas and salads of our everyday meals that I envision; there’s also the scald of hot water during the first seconds of dishwashing before I’ve balanced the water’s temperature, the scrape of the knife’s edge against my nails if my hands are shaking after a long day at work, or the hiss of a paper cut on my finger tip when I pull out aluminum sheets too fast during the early morning scramble out of the house.

I look at my cuticles now, my knuckles, my shapeless nails, the remnants of bruises and cuts and burns all over the skin of my hands. This is skin that has seen better days, and will continue to see more hardship. More turmeric stains for one, ha! Would I have been happier if such hands had been blemish-free? All that exposure to the elements, all the risks taken everyday, all the ”being out there” that my hands are doing, all of it is metaphorically congruous with what this other part of my body is also doing constantly. A part that is well protected physically but is just as equally exposed spiritually. It too is not blemish-free.

We make a choice everyday to engage our delicate hands in work that we know can and will hurt them. Our beautiful, slender fingers push and pull on things close to our body’s weight and we wear the brunt of this effort gladly. When broken, we splint them, heal them and move on to more work, more risks. I cannot chose not to use my hands and spare them the wear and tear, because then I would stop living. Likewise, that part of me that is encased in layers of muscle and bone for protection will never be immune to the elements of the soul. No matter what, it stays vulnerable and it will scar. Because the only other choice is really to stop living.