Why We Need to Work With Our Hands
A sweaty summertime rain falls on the corrugated tin roof of my father’s workshop as I position one end of a ten-foot, mill-cut cypress board near the mouth of a tool called a planer. I push the wood into the planer, and the high-pitched whirring begins as a layer is stripped from the face of the board. The jagged gray surface becomes slightly smoother and less weathered, and a sense of yellowish wood tones beneath is revealed. After several passes, the board bursts with vibrant grain; it’s ready to be sanded.
My grandparents and father built this workshop by hand, using mostly materials that were reclaimed from jobsites they’d worked throughout Freeport, Florida. “Dad made us back the nails out of the wood so that we could reuse them on the workshop,” my father tells me.
My grandmother Mary Alice says, “We got this stretch of wood from the Aunt Becky Ward house when we tore it down.”
My father and my grandmother are each missing half a finger, sliced off by the same saw that sat in the same location in the workshop for many, many years. For this reason among others, I have never once used this saw.
Vibrations from the electric palm sander tremble through my forearm. I can feel my teeth chatter when clinching my jaws. Up and down the board, always working with the grain, I run the sander until yellows and reds and greens and even hints of blue erupt from the decades-old board.
This board needs to be joined to another board that has undergone the same treatment, and together they will form the top of the long desk that my wife desires. Wrought iron table legs wait in the corner to be screwed into the underside of the tabletop. Sanding and screwing things together is the extent of my abilities, so my father joins the wood together, using tools whose names I don’t know with methods he learned from his father.
Lessons of Work With Your Hands From the Workshop
My father’s hands are strong and weathered, carrying scars that narrate decades of good, hard labor in the manual arts. The veins in his hands course with wisdom and intuition for making and repairing things. My hands, however, tell no such stories. Despite my father’s best efforts, the contractor gene skipped a generation. I do the sort of carpentry that any child could do if given proper supervision. My mind traffics in concepts, ideas, strategies, and stories. It does not meddle in mechanics or structures and certainly not in saws.
The Truth That Work With Your Hands Reveals
Still, this old workshop is one of a handful of places I go when needing to rejuvenate. This space lures me, holds me, and heals me. I used to wonder if it was sheer nostalgia, or perhaps a way and excuse to spend time with my father. But I think there’s more to it than that. I’m reminded of a story my friend and teacher Dr. Chris Green heard from his friend Professor David Goa:
David’s father was quite a skilled carpenter, and he was repairing the pastor’s boat. . . .
David [is] in his father’s shop as his dad is talking with the pastor and repairing this boat . . . with oak. . . .
Eventually the pastor leaves, and David’s father says . . . , “We need to pray for our pastor, because he has no oak in his life. . . . Pastors only have people in their lives, not oak. And people lie— they don’t mean to, but they flatter, they exaggerate, they accuse, they beg and cajole. But you never really know whether or not the work you are doing is good when you’re dealing with people.” . . .
“Tomorrow . . . I’ll come down, and I will use all of my strength and I will try to break these two pieces of wood that I’ve glued together. And the wood and the glue will talk to me. They will let me know whether or not my work is good. And they cannot lie. They will tell me the truth. But pastors don’t have that in their lives.” . . .
. . . Do we have oak in our lives? . . . That’s the malaise of [our lives]. We’re getting further and further from things that just tell us the truth about who we really are and the quality of the work that we’re doing.
Losing Meaning When We Don’t Work With Our Hands
Perhaps, like me, you don’t spend much time working with oak, which I’m just using as another way of saying mak-ing things with your hands. These days, work is less manual and more mental (a very recent historical change). Andy Crouch observes that “less than 2 percent of the population in the United States in the twenty-first century are farmers, compared to 38 percent in 1900 and 58 percent in 1860.” Many human-centered jobs are giving way to machine-oriented jobs. Those jobs that remain human centered are increas-ingly ones where humans mind machines and use increasingly less creative capacity; therefore, they tend to feel less and less meaningful. In no longer working with our hands, we lose touch with something of what it means to be human.
