I remember a day during the summer I lived in Venice when the sun was still bright in our kitchen and I was making gnocchi for dinner. One of my roommates was a strikingly observant, insightful person, and she was watching me cook with a somewhat disarming level of interest. I picked up my watch and checked the time, then arranged it so I could keep an eye on it as the gnocchi started to float to the surface.
My roommate looked stunned and asked quizzically, "Are you timing your gnocchi?"
I sheepishly admitted that I was and asked her if I was doing something egregious in gnocchi preparation by introducing the element of time.
"No," she shrugged, "I would just never think to do that."
Later at dinner, she was watching the way I used my utensils and I could see brilliant wheels turning in her mind. Out of nowhere, as was her habit, she mumbled, "I think the way you use your hands, it's always the same." She continued to explain that everything a person did, from the way they brushed their hair and did their makeup in the morning, the way they composed a drawing, down to the way they timed their gnocchi, had a certain character and essence of self made evident by their hands.
I have thought so much about the profundity of this observation and what it means, especially regarding art and science.
I think about the way I iron clothes or arrange my keys and paper money all facing in the same direction, and I can see this specific yearning for order and precision. I look at my writing, my drawing, and I think that these are just as much products of my hands as batters I mix or vegetables I slice just so. It should come as no surprise that I knit and sew with very even tension, that I mix chemical compounds in a very steady, ordered way (and get excellent purity and yields, huzzah), and that if I have any talent for kayaking or sailing it's because of an innate understanding of equilibrium and balance.
Then I think about my mind and the tempestuous, disordered state of chaos and confusion that usually dominates my thinking processes and pushes me toward impulsive, emotional decisions. Some areas of my life are agonizingly controlled, and others are a free-for-all disaster (I'm working on them, for real).
Is it possible, I wonder, for my hands to save me from who I am? Are my hands doing what my conscious brain can't, or won't?
My hands express ideas clearly and concisely when I am flustered by language. My hands show my affection when I can't even say how I feel. When I thought I didn't understand something in Calculus, I started writing numbers or sketching curves and my hands worked out a solution.
I have always been a haptic learner. The notes I take in class appear like a work of art, littered with diagrams and tables, though I rarely need them, since I retain information by writing it. When I want to be clear of a lab procedure, I draw it, to put it in my mind.
When we were children, one of my aunts complained that both my brother and I had "fidgety" hands. We seem to need constant use of our hands, folding and refolding scraps of paper, lining things up, opening and closing barrettes or safety pins, wrapping string or rubber bands clockwise and then counterclockwise, and on and on. Even when my brain seems to be in a state of total inertia, my hands are always working at something, moving, feeling, making, doing. My worst impatience, by far, comes when I have to sit still and do nothing with my hands.
So I've resolved to pay more attention to my hands and what they want to do. I'm going to let them draw and write when they want to, paint even if it's an impractical time, follow them outside when they want to make photographs, cook when takeout would be easier, and generally engage in the things they want to, whether it means touching things my brain says not to or holding others' hands when my heart screams no.
I have this feeling, however foolishly optimistic, that my hands know what they're doing, and if I trust them, so will I.
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