My Hands: Past, Present, and Future

My Hands Have Had Several Careers

I've been thinking about my hands lately. They've been a massage therapist's hands for sixteen years. That's wild!

They know how to find tension before someone tells me where it hurts. They understand pressure and resistance. They've learned that sometimes the most useful thing you can do is work slowly.

But those same hands have had quite a few other jobs.

They've wedged clay and thrown pottery on a wheel. They've planted gardens, pulled weeds, turned compost, handled worms, pruned plants, and hauled soil. They've held drills, saws, shovels, loppers, staple guns, and whatever other tool seemed necessary for the project I had decided I could probably figure out.

They've set cat traps in the dark, held frightened kittens, administered medicine, cleaned cages, and carried animals into veterinary clinics. Long before any of that, they were small hands turning over rocks along the shores of Puget Sound. I can still remember searching underneath them for crabs, pulling apart eelgrass and seaweed to see what might be hiding there, touching barnacles on dock pilings, and picking things up to examine them before putting them back.

I wanted to know what was there.

Apparently, I still do.

The Next Career for My Hands

I'm preparing to return to school for Environmental Studies, which means my hands may soon have another job.

They'll be taking notes and relearning math. Eventually, I hope they'll be working with maps, collecting field data, identifying plants, examining soil, taking measurements, helping restore landscapes, or doing work I don't even know exists yet.

I have no idea exactly what that will look like, and that's part of the fun.

What I do know is that I'm no longer interested in treating my past as a collection of unrelated chapters—or my regrets as embarrassing evidence that I should have made better decisions. I made the decisions I knew how to make at the time. Then I lived. I learned things. I became good at things. I changed.

Now I'm a 36-year-old woman looking at course catalogs and wondering what else these hands could learn to do.