With my Left Hand

What can you do with your left hand? (Or if you are left-handed, with your right one?)

For most of us the non-dominant hand is in a sort of ‘supporting role’ to the hero that is the dominant hand. Its job is to give added strength or balance to the agenda of the dominant hand.

Now there is the belief that using the right hand activates the left side of the brain, and vice versa. There is also the belief that the left side of the brain is more ‘rational’ and the right side more ‘emotional’. This would imply that most of the time, our ‘doing’ is led by the ‘rational’ part of the brain, with emotions in a secondary role.

But is that really so? What about left handed people- do their emotions lead? I use the word ‘belief’ in the above explanation because increasingly this clean delineation is thought to be an over-simplification. And I, not being a brain researcher, cannot comment at all.

However it is true that there are people who diligently practice using the non-dominant hand- the most common way being to brush their teeth with the left hand, to engage the right side of the brain (!)

The good thing is, that both the left side and right side of my brain are pretty open, or so I like to think. I recently went to this workshop which required participants to draw prototypical pictures of the images they saw intuitively in response to certain questions.

This prototypical art was to be created with one’s non-dominant hand. What kind of art do you expect to make with your non-dominant hand? I imagined making badly drawn squiggly lines and asymmetrical splotches of paint.

No paintbrushes to be used, but slow strokes of gouache paint with one’s left hand. Fingers and palm. Take your time, no rush.

Well, here’s what the first picture looked like.

Being supremely surprised at finding symmetry and neatness, I decided I’ll give the second one some shading as well.

“What are you drawing?”

“Pomegranate,” I said.

This sounded too foreign to some of my fellow participants, who were not native English speakers. Couple of them caught on to the sound of ‘grenade’ and nodded enthusiastically that it did indeed look like a bomb.

By the time it was time for the third and final painting, I wanted to make it good. Like, right hand good. And here it is..

The facilitator asked us in closing how we felt. People talked about feeling calm. Some were men in their 40s and 50s who had touched paints after three decades or more. I dwelled on how much we do not know of our own potential- people who were not into painting at all had created beautiful work with their left hands. The facilitator asked us to remain aware and available to ourselves that evening. I did not mention that for some reason my right hand was hurting though I had worked with my left one for 5-6 hours.

I took the facilitator’s advice and went to the river. The sun was still shining and dancing brightly on the water. I was there for couple of hours, maybe more. Walking, sitting, reading, and mostly watching. I watched babies being brought out in their strollers, the friends that accompanied young mothers, the couples who were jogging, teenagers who were daring to swim though the waters were cold, the old man who also sat a few paces away and was watching all the same things and we were also watching each other. A kind of camaraderie among beings who did not even now they were feeling it, a kind of being a part of something together though they did not even know it..

I read accounts of people speaking in first person, some in second person, and some in the third. They spoke of courage, and hope,  tragedy,  love. They lived, and they loved.. they fell, and they rose..they tried, and failed, and accidentally succeeded.. and smiled, and died, were missing, were missed. And the sun still glowed the river up and shone into my eyes. And my heart was full, so full, I thought it would spill over. Not happy, not sad,  just full… Not exploding, but expanding. Like I could let every feeling ever felt by anyone pass through my heart… that is was indeed passing through my heart, and spilling over.. and the sun was shining, and river flowed..

I don’t know if people who brush their teeth with their left hand end up feeling the same, or if it only happens if you do it for 6 hours straight. Perhaps it comes from the meditative quality of the slow unhurried repetitive motion- like advocates of tantric sex will tell you. Perhaps it was accentuated by an emotional full moon that night, and my cycle which had accelerated to meet the full moon. So, well, hormones.

I can’t say for sure what it was. But one thing is certain. We don’t know ourselves as well as we suppose we do. We understand so little of how things- even our own actions, emotions and biology- impact us. We understand almost nothing of the impact of things even as they are happening, or even immediately after. If we are attentive and lucky, we may catch the string going back and connecting to its source now and then, in retrospect. And that is why life is interesting. Because we simply cannot understand it well enough. The mystery, and the efforts to look behind the curtain, are unceasing.