Work with your Hands
When I first met my now-husband's family, we went for coffee at his grandparent's house. After we enjoyed our coffee and treats which rolled right into lunch, hobbit-style, we all stood to clean up together. Opa (Dutch for "grandpa") was washing dishes and I was drying when, seemingly out of the blue, he turned to me and said in an approving tone, "I can tell that you have worked with your hands."
"Oh!" I replied, somewhat startled. "Yes."
And that was the end of that. The comment stuck with me, however, and once in a while it will pop into my mind as I'm doing the dishes, remembering myself standing in that kitchen with Opa. He was correct in his observation; I had had plenty of practice working with my hands, doing everything from peeling potatoes to pulling weeds to helping with assembly in my dad's metal-working shop. But, until then, it had never struck me as a particularly admirable trait, something of which one could be proud.
Why is that?
My sister once told me that someone she knew had recently gotten engaged, and the family of that someone was extremely disappointed because the new fiancé was (dun dun dunnnnnnnnn) a plumber.
Which also reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently in which the hosts, both writers, were discussing some of the difficulties of leading a the life of a "creative," how it is hard to keep coming up with ideas, the pressures of performance, etc, etc, etc. One host went on to suggest that if your job utilizes your brain, your sabbath should be physical in nature, maybe going on a hike, and if, conversely, your job doesn't use your brain [here the host actually said the words, like a plumber, for example], your sabbath should be mental in nature, perhaps reading a book.
Those poor plumbers; they're really taking a beating here today.
To me, the idea that a plumber does not use their brain, or is not in an admirable profession, is just absolutely bonkers. The amount of problem-solving, general knowledge, and creativity that a plumber utilizes in one day of work is more than most people access in a month, in my opinion. Which leads right into my next beef: are we not all artists? Are we not all creatives? Those labels should not apply only to painters, writers, and musicians; they belong to all of us. A plumber solving the puzzle of a network of sewer lines needs to access creativity and innovative thinking, resulting in a structured and useful system: art. A welder perfects his or her technique, reliably creating a symmetric, strong weld: art. A homemaker stands in the kitchen making and shaping biscuits, placing them carefully on the pan: art. An accountant labors over a spreadsheet and finds an ingenious solution to the problem at hand: art.
I could keep going. But here we are, at what it means to be human: we all need to create, to have purposeful work, and to see the beauty in our work in order to flourish. We need to better value those who "work with their hands," and to value those skills in ourselves and in our children, noticing and appreciating and recognizing the fruit of that labor as art, just like Opa did.
