These Hands
Today I am grateful for my hands, my fingers, my opposable thumbs. I am grateful for all the many tasks made easy by my working hands.
Consciously focusing on gratitude helps me take less for granted, take more of life as the gift, as the grace it is. I was reading someone else's words of gratitude about their own hands and it quickly got me thinking. I am trying to type this now without using my thumbs and it is obvious how much slower, more deliberate, it makes me. I tried to cut up an apple without using either thumb, then just using one. Wow! A short exercise like this sure helps me see the challenges that people with disabilities or missing body parts must face. I only touched the surface of that realization and I did it by choice.
There is tremendous value in complaining less and appreciating more. Complaining about all the work I need to do quickly becomes an exercise in gratitude when I realize how fortunate I am to have things to do, and hands to do them with.
And having to be more deliberate is certainly not all bad. In fact, deliberating is vastly underrated in our society today. We want everything quickly, we expect it. It is a sign of progress when things are quicker, more convenient. Or is it? With too much at our fingertips, are we forgetting to use the hands those fingers are connected to for good labors? I think so. It is one of the goals of this blog, for me and for readers, to more readily see that the joy is in the work, the daily grind.
Today I will appreciate my working hands. I will look for opportunities to use them for good.
Consciously focusing on gratitude helps me take less for granted, take more of life as the gift, as the grace it is. I was reading someone else's words of gratitude about their own hands and it quickly got me thinking. I am trying to type this now without using my thumbs and it is obvious how much slower, more deliberate, it makes me. I tried to cut up an apple without using either thumb, then just using one. Wow! A short exercise like this sure helps me see the challenges that people with disabilities or missing body parts must face. I only touched the surface of that realization and I did it by choice.
There is tremendous value in complaining less and appreciating more. Complaining about all the work I need to do quickly becomes an exercise in gratitude when I realize how fortunate I am to have things to do, and hands to do them with.
And having to be more deliberate is certainly not all bad. In fact, deliberating is vastly underrated in our society today. We want everything quickly, we expect it. It is a sign of progress when things are quicker, more convenient. Or is it? With too much at our fingertips, are we forgetting to use the hands those fingers are connected to for good labors? I think so. It is one of the goals of this blog, for me and for readers, to more readily see that the joy is in the work, the daily grind.
Today I will appreciate my working hands. I will look for opportunities to use them for good.
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