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Monday, July 11, 2005

Reach Your Hand

“Reach your hand as far as it goes and I’ll reach mine. Do you suppose that we could make the world so small that there would be no walls at all?”

Singing the above song was my favorite part of the morning when my family would attend my grandmother’s church. Partially I liked it because it signaled the end of the service, when we could rise out of the wooden pews and escape the small sanctuary, whose beautiful, bright stained-glass windows cast prismatic rainbows on the congregation.

But also I liked it because it seemed a simple message of hope. Unlike the rest of the service, it seemed like something we could do that would actually bring joy to others. Sermons were too abstract and often, I thought, pointless. But reach my hand and you reach yours: That’s manageable.

To me, hands are fascinating. Their physical makeup is a miracle in and of themselves, a complex structure of 34 muscles, 29 bones, 123 ligaments, 48 nerves and 30 arteries. And those figures are approximate because some people have more or fewer of each of these.

If you were able to watch only a person’s hands for a week, without speaking or having any prior knowledge of that person, at the end of that time I believe you would know the person very well; perhaps even better than if you had spent a week talking. Hands reveal what words cover up.

The physical characteristics alone tell much about a person. For example, if you look at my hands, you will see they are average size. The knuckles closest to my hand are slightly hairy, as are the backs of my hands. Blisters on the inside of my thumbs tell of Sundays spent swinging a bat. There is a half-inch-long scar on the outside of my right thumb. It’s a mystery scar, because I don’t remember what caused it. My left pinkie will not straighten thanks to my Tae Kwon Do-trained brother. My fingernails are short but not all the same length. I don’t bite, I tear.

I care nothing about cuticles.

If you touch my hands, you will find they are soft and often quite cold.

And the things our own hands tell us… The roughness of an old oak table. The fabric of a shirt. The temperature of a surface. The shape of a face.

When words fail, we resort to communicating with our hands. I think that’s especially true with anger or love — the most extreme emotions.

There is much more to write about hands. The symbolic nature of washing hands is worth 1,000 words alone.

But the point I wanted to make before going on this tangent is that the simplest things are often the hardest. Sometimes reaching your hand is difficult, both in a figurative and literal sense. Sometimes we don’t know how the other person will respond to our extended hand, whether they will accept it or reject it, and so we keep it close to our sides. Sometimes half an inch is all that separates our hands when we are lying in bed, but that half an inch makes all the difference between friends and lovers.

Sometimes when others extend their hands to us, we are too afraid, or too proud, to grab it and hold on tight.

I’m not so naive to think that “there will be no walls at all.” People are inevitably separated from others by walls that are built both by others and by themselves. But I can’t help but believe that reaching out our hands for others to hold will do some good — even if we’re so scared we have to close our eyes and reach into the dark.

Posted by Aaron on July 11, 2005 10:04 AM