Using Your Hands

One

Leisure

God, in His generosity, gave us our five senses not only to attend to our bodily needs but to celebrate the goodness of reality.

In our leisure time, we are able to recreate through all five senses. We may use our recreation to delight our senses of taste and smell with good food and good drink (and good friends!). We may use our recreation time to build up our sense of delight through the sense of sight, beautiful artwork, good movies, and especially by visually appreciating the magnificence of nature. We may use our recreation time to enjoy good music through the sense of hearing. But there’s a final sense, a sense of great moral importance, and we often completely forget to cultivate it in a delightful way through good leisure.

That sense is the sense of touch.

Two

Touch and Reality

In their very fine book, A Mind at Peace, Josh Hochschild and Chris Blum dedicate a chapter to the human importance of the sense of touch. They point out that touch is the sense of certainty. It’s how St. Thomas assured himself that Our Lord had really risen.

It’s the sense of competence. We say someone has a good grasp or a good feel for a certain subject matter. We say they can “handle it.” Touch is the sense we use to describe how someone is doing. We say, “How are you feeling?” Touch is the sense whereby we most suffer.

In other words, touch is the sense that most directly and powerfully puts us in touch with reality.

So if we are trying to appreciate and celebrate the goodness of God’s world during our free time, it seems like touch shouldn’t be left out of the equation.

And yet an age of phones and computers has made it so that almost none of us know how to use our hands, our sense of touch, for anything more sophisticated than typing or scrolling. Experiencing reality through the prism of the screen often serves more to disconnect us from reality instead of causing us to engage with it.

So how can we reconnect to reality through the sense of touch?

Three

Manual Skills

Long gone is the day when the majority of people were craftsmen, who came to know the hard limits of reality, and how to work with reality, directly through their hands. But today we actually have enough leisure time that if we want we can develop manual skills that are deeply satisfying and fulfilling

For instance, we can learn a musical instrument and use our hands to make beauty for our ears. We can learn to draw, learn to paint, learn to sew, or crochet and use our hands to make beauty for our eyes. We could start gardening and use our hands to work with nature and cultivate its beauty and capacity to nourish us. Get real food and ingredients, and use your hands to cut and chop and mix and measure and cook and bake.

There are other skills we can develop, even things like marksmanship with a gun or a bow, that will allow us to appreciate the contours of reality through distance, force, and wind. And disciplining yourself to conform yourself through your hands to the shape of the real world is a way of growing wiser, and more mature – since mature people always adapt themselves to reality, instead of expecting the opposite to happen.

These manual skills and crafts are worth doing just because they’re good. It’s a form of leisure. Even if you never get good at these skills, you can enjoy getting better at them.

As Chesterton says, “What’s worth doing is worth doing badly,” especially if doing it makes you better and happier.

Four

Games

Certain kinds of games are a great way to develop manual skills and use those skills elegantly with other people.

For those who are young enough, the sense of touch is refined by things like basketball and baseball and pickleball, and the sense of balance by skiing or soccer.

Blum and Hochschild say that touch is the sense of artists and athletes, and the feeling of moving your body skillfully and staying in shape is a great pleasure. But if you can’t do these more active games, there are elegant games like pool, bocci ball, or even chess. These aren’t so much games of manual dexterity, but can be a source of beauty and elegance all their own. These are all things you can slowly enjoy getting better at for the rest of your life. 

And the fact that you’ll never be the best actually frees you to enjoy it. To quote again from Chesterton, amateur is just the French word for “lover.” Because you love the activity, not glory or victory or being the best  You’re an amateur because you love to do something worthwhile, at whatever skill level, just because it is worthwhile.

Five

Skill and love of God and neighbor

All our skills can bring us closer to others. We play games with other people. We exercise with other people. We make music with other people. We give gifts from our garden to other people. We offer gifts from our crafts to other people: artwork, quilts, knitted clothing. And all these things, as with all our activities, we should do with the glory of God in mind.

We should offer prayers of thanksgiving to God after every game. The first songs we learn to play on our new instrument should be our favorite hymn. The first image we learn to draw should be the cross. One of the best crafts to learn is the craft of making unique, handmade rosaries. And when we garden, let’s save our best flowers for the statue of Our Lady.

So our perfection of skillful leisure may become a delight to ourselves, and to others, and to God.