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17. Look at your hands
Look at your hands awhile. Turn them over and study them, their curves and lines, maybe stretch the fingers open a few times as if receiving a gift and then release them.
Look now at one hand, thumb pointing upwards, and open it as if you're about to slide it around a mug of tea (it's even better if you have a mug of real tea there with you). Our hands are superconductors for thoughts; they move at the speed of light to reach out for things, to tap on keyboards, to move cursors across screens.
In fact, they often work so fast that we overlook how they work. How they hold things; how they grip and grasp and tear and pull.
But your hands reflect how you are, so if they grip and grasp tighter, the likelihood is that the tightness will run throughout your body, that your structure will be (de-) formed by the desire or fear behind the gripping and grasping.
By contrast, if your hands are soft and gently expressive of your wants, the rest of your body will be so too.
This is not an invitation to be softly-waftly, but to notice how much effort we put into one thing and thence to explore how that effort runs throughout the rest of our body.
So let's get really specific: when you reach to wrap your fingers around the mug, what happens? Your fingers open just enough to move around the mug. As they do so, you may notice a light stretching along the inside of your palm and your fingers, as the finger pulleys (tendons) in there are stretched. Tendons are a dense form of fascia[1]. Healthy fascial sheets work like elastic – once stretched and released, they bounce back into their shorter form.
Once your thumb and fingers are either side of the mug, let them go. Notice what you do, and notice what happens.
It's entirely possible to switch from opening your fingers to closing them with both verbs representing deliberate actions. But it's more interesting to notice how we can open our fingers and then release them, just to have them bounce back into a closed shape around the mug[2].
See how comfortable that is? Notice how little effort you've applied to the mug. It's as if you're just keeping your hands warm. Now can you maintain that simple contact and lift the mug, or do you tighten up just before doing so?
Can you sense something else too – that your relationship with the mug is different? That you are less holding an object and more relating to an entity? That your hands are receiving the mug as well as holding it?[3]
Of course, I'm not talking about holding a cup of tea. That's just a convenient study. I'm thinking about anything we strive for – object, idea, person, target, goal, ambition. How we hold ourselves vis-à-vis our goals decides the quality of our relationship with those goals. And the importance of the quality of our relationship with our goals ... is tomorrow's subject.
For now, enjoy your tea.
Footnotes
Fascia is made of collagen fibres. These collagen fibres are individually capable of lengthening under tension, and collectively they can stretch apart to double their inert length (that's quite a stretch). They can stretch and release both lengthways and sideways. ↩︎
The English language constrains our ability to express what we perceive, and by so doing actually limits our perception. We have active and passive voices for verbs: I open the door, and the door is opened. We are lacking a voice for things that just seem to happen. The opposite of I open my hands sounds like it should be I close my hands. But then you have two actions: opening and closing. What I am looking for is the non-action of the fingers closing once the opening has been released. It's the bounce-back of the stretched tendons that isn't so easily expressed in English. For example, if I say stop opening your hands, do your fingers stiffen where they are, like a Pompeiian statue trying to ward off the volcanic eruption, or do they bounce back to a relaxed closed position? In other words, do you actively open and then actively stop, or do you actively open and then let that activity go? ↩︎
Looking back towards my earlier Buber articles, I suggested that we can't create Buberian encounter on demand, but that we can set up the conditions that might allow encounter to arise. If that's true, the more two-way our hands relate to the mug, the closer we are getting to setting up those conditions. ↩︎