What Our Hands Know

 

Each Saturday, I share a thought-provoking journal-writing prompt here on the blog. These weekly prompts offer a specific topic or question to encourage you to explore your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. You can answer them exactly as they're written, or let them serve as a starting point for a larger, more formal piece of writing. So long as you write something in response, anything goes. But by giving yourself a specific focus, you can delve deeper into your writing and uncover new insights along the way. Feel free to personalize the prompt and make it entirely your own.

This week, I want to write about hands.

Stop for a second and look at yours. Really look. These are the hands that have done everything you've ever done—every meal cooked, every letter written, every face held, every door opened and closed behind you. They've been burned and bandaged and decorated. They've shaken and soothed and made things out of nothing. They keep a record no photograph can: a small scar from a kitchen in a house you no longer live in, calluses from work you no longer do, the particular way your fingers still know a phone number you haven't dialed in years. Our hands remember what our minds file away. This week, let's read what's written there.

Use these questions as starting points for your journal entry:

1. Describe them honestly. Write about your hands exactly as they are today—their size and shape, their lines, their nails, the rings you wear or don't. Include what you'd rather not: the spots, the knuckles, the veins, the way they've changed. Then ask yourself where your feelings about them came from. Whose hands do yours resemble?
2. Catalog the skills. What do your hands know how to do? Braid hair, knead dough, tie a fishing knot, play three chords, thread a needle, hold a steering wheel through a curve without thinking. List as many as you can. Then choose one and write about the day you learned it—who taught you, and whether they knew they were handing you something you'd keep.
3. Remember other hands. Whose hands do you carry in memory? The ones that braided your hair or checked your forehead for fever. The ones you held in a hospital, or at an altar, or in the back seat of a car when you were seventeen. Describe someone else's hands in as much detail as you can summon, and write about what those hands gave you.
4. Name what they've carried. Our hands do the heavy work of a life—they've packed boxes, signed papers, wiped tears, let go of things they didn't want to let go of. Write about one thing your hands have carried that nobody could see. What did it cost them? What did it build in you?
5. Look ahead. What do you want your hands to make in the time you have left with them? A garden, a book, a quilt, a habit of reaching for someone first? Write it as a promise—one small, specific thing you'd like your hands to become known for.

Take one of these prompts, or weave them all together. Or simply trace the outline of your hand on the page and write inside it until you run out of room. You might let the art images guide you, too. So long as you're writing about what your hands know, anything goes.

My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required—just your creativity. 🌻