How’s your grip (…on reality?)
image by Claudio Schwarz @purzlbaum
I invite you to take a moment now to look at your hands.
What do you see?
Beyond the wrinkles, spots, dry patches (it is winter, after all..); deeper than the recent manicure (or need for one); more than how they appear … or even how they feel ... can you greet them as fellow travelers on your journey through this life?
Where have they been? What have they done?
What have these hands, your hands - felt, explored, participated in, caressed, grasped, repelled, gestured?
Open receiving palms, clenched fists.
Instruments of expression within their own complexity, or wielding a pen, or tapping a keyboard.
Bringing your world closer to you, manifesting creative works, preparing food, evoking music from inanimate instruments, supporting postures, massaging a loved one, shielding eyes, ears, mouth, holding the hand of another.
Feeling warmth, cold, prickly, smooth, pain, pleasure.
My husband and I often compare the similarities in our hands, particularly the sinewy tendons, the robust veins - evidence of demand for increased blood flow and tissue changes due to our professions as bodyworkers.
Our histories prior to those careers are vastly different: his more given to carpentry, excavation, even playing music - mine to cooking, writing, crafting and art.
Both pairs have since adapted - in shape, sensitivity, strength.
What histories do your hands tell? Can you read the lives in the hands of others?
We live in a pivotal moment in time - and one where the prominence in hand usage is in great decline.
What does these mean for us as a human species and our evolution? Anything? Everything?
Losing our grip
Loss of grip strength in both men and women over the last 30 years has been a recent topic of interest and concern in the movement science world - not just for its own sake, but the indications this presents regarding the risks of earlier death.
Aside from the point being lost that this doesn’t mean that doing hand exercises will ensure you live longer, it certainly indicates that as a society, we aren’t using or needing our hands to do as many tasks that require strength.
We have more gadgets, tools, touch and voice-activated devices that ‘save our hands’, and very few of us hang our body weight from our hands, and so, in the use-it-or-lose-it economy of the body, these marvelous and uniquely human appendages are becoming weaker.
(I was recently humbled by a 72-year-old Mennonite woman who - while I was rummaging for the can opener - popped the lid of her home-canned tomato sauce with just a finger…)
It’s also important to realize that the effect of less hand usage doesn’t stop just at the hands.
We’re also far less likely to load our bodies in ways that would also support arm strength, shoulder mobility, spinal integrity (including support for the weight of the head), and all the large and subtle things that go along with upper body usage - of which the hands are a key player.
And then, there’s the fine motor skills.
In a recent podcast by Katy Bowman, her co-host (and certified occupational therapist assistant) Dani Alexander was sharing her experiences of working with young kids who were struggling with tasks like buttoning their own jackets, or being mistakenly labeled as learning disabled because they had trouble manipulating a pencil.
What are the implications for these kids as they grow up?
Will it matter in a world where hand usage won’t be required to do much of life’s essentials?
Here is an 18-minute video I stumbled on, featuring a two-year-old girl raised in a nomadic reindeer family in northern Russia.
She’s doing her best to keep up with her mother’s chores, but I especially marveled at the beauty and dexterity of her chubby hands (minute 1:52).
Watch to the end to see her also hauling firewood and feeding the dogs…)
In praise of manual labor…
As I’ve been pondering this topic, I encounter more and more examples of what we’re losing as our worlds become automated, compressed, standardized, perfected.
We’ve become so ‘product-oriented’ - get the thing made as quickly as possible - we’re coming to diminish, even look down on, the direct embodied involvement of the creative process itself.
But, if you’ve ever engaged with a task that employed using your hands, even if clumsily, less-than-expertly - like kneading bread, writing a letter in cursive, learning to play a instrument, fixing a broken item, transplanting seedlings, soothing a crying child - I hope you can recall the connection, the joy, the hard-to-define satisfaction of bringing a creation through your very hands, rather than outsourcing to a gadget, tech device or ‘expert’.
“I really feel like so much of this hand work, and I’ve actually seen some research on it, where there’s a particular pleasure we get from just utilizing our hands in creative - in fine motor ways that create.
Where it was almost secondary to the creation itself. It was the fact that you were utilizing your hands.
So even doing some things, we’ll call it mindless, is really great for just nourishing this part of your body. Again, it’s like being barefoot.
Yes, you’re hands are not shod like your feet are shod but they’re also not really interacting with the world very much anymore. ‘
So they’re sort of still understimulated, like our feet inside shoes are.”
~ Katy Bowman, The Move Your DNA Podcast: “How to Improve Your Grip Strength and Why It Matters”
Then I also got to wondering …
So, this past summer, a stroke had left my dad’s left arm and leg incapacitated - which led to hospital, rehab, home with PT, and back again.
During one of my visits to him, after a second stroke seemed to wipe out any progress he had made with therapy, he had been confined to a bed for some weeks.
His cognition was declining, which, yes, was the result of the stroke, and possibly some of the med treatments.
But, I couldn’t help but wonder what effect not moving had on the brain ... more specifically, the absence of any tactile engagement with the environment.
I was imagining what I would feel like lying in the same bed, day after day, staring at the same walls, the same tv screen - without even a clear memory of what happened an hour ago, nor the ability to envision the future. I was remembering how many people - myself included - during the lockdown period of 2020 lamented we couldn’t readily place what day it was.
I theorized that there was a lot of information related to sense of place, a sense of ‘reality’ that’s gathered relative to our ability to touch it.
To manipulate actual things in our environment is part of what keeps us grounded in a literal connection to the real world.
I was remembering how I noticed one day, that in times of overwhelm, I might not just clean and organize my space, but touch every item in it.
To move a knick knack, or replace a photo just so, as if to expand, or even confine my presence back into my personal spatial and concrete environment.
“Touch and the world of touch bring us out of the anonymity of distance into the intimacy of belonging.
Humans use their hands to touch - to explore, to trace, and to feel the world outside of them.”
~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
If this is true, what does this say about our increasing disconnect from the tangible world?
Where more of our interactions and influence - our moving of personal energy into the world - are touch-activated, or retina-activated or voice-activated?
What does this say about our proprioception - the information system within the body that tells us where we are relative to the wold around us, and our body parts relative to each other?
Painting by Sebastiano Santi in 'Chiesa dei Santi Apostoli' church
In a time where we are relying overmuch on what we see (or what we’re being told we see), where we are free-floating in the ether of concept, abstract and ideology, how assuring it might be to once in a while, get our feet - or hands - on the ground, just for a balanced perspective.
Even as Jesus chided Thomas for needing proof that he was really there, he honored the request - allowing Thomas to touch the wounds and confirm the miracle that he was full-bodily present.
We clearly need this validation - as proof of our own existence, as well as the world around us.
So, what to do?
There’s a multitude of hand exercises available. But, consider activities that are already purposeful, meaningful or at least enjoyable to you, and engage with greater attention to your hands.
For tactile engagement: Learning to crochet, playing with clay, handwriting notes, shelling peas, picking blossoms
For strength: Chopping vegetables, lifting cast iron cookware, body weight-bearing exercises like yoga, carrying bags (with hands), reading hardcover books :)
For healing: Self or ‘other’ massage and other hands-on healing practices. (Here’s a full-body practice!)
