The Quiet Power of Learning Through Your Hands
But there is a certain type of knowledge that you cannot speed up, or teach solely on a screen — the kind you get when your fingers encounter a bit of resistance, when an object yields to your touch, and when incremental, precise actions slowly make sense. Doing something with your hands instructs the mind through the body: The wobbly hand grows steadier, the action of a single gesture becomes ingrained and the brain comes to understand it more fully. The conversations between hand and object result in more lasting comprehension than theoretical instruction alone can provide. You gain it gradually, increment by increment, until one day you realize you possess it.
One of the virtues of this method is that it’s transparent. If you’re cutting a straight line and you slip up, you’ll know. If you squeeze too hard on your leather and it tears, you’ll see it. If your wall of clay collapses, you’ll notice. Not only that, but in each of those moments you’ll discover exactly what you need to do to improve. You need to straighten your knife. You need to lighten your grip. You need to wait a day before you add that next layer. Through the act of creation, you’re learning to embrace your mistakes, rather than being told that they’re an unfortunate but ultimately minor aspect of the learning process. And as you practice, day after day and week after week, you’ll develop the skills you need. More than that, though, you’ll learn to trust your hands in a way that you could never trust a teacher’s demonstration.
This means patience. Lots of patience. A project may involve dozens of sessions, because paint needs time to dry, or adhesives time to cure, or because my hands need a rest and my mind a break. Those breaks aren’t an interruption to the process; they are a part of it. They give my unconscious time to mull over what I’m doing, and often I find the answer to a problem upon resuming work. The act of working and not working, in other words, is an echo of the act of day and night, summer and winter. In working with my hands, I learn to live within the constraints of my own nature, to work with time, rather than against it.
Beyond that, the intangible benefits are numerous. For one, every time you finish a project (be it something simple like a wooden spoon, a simple sewn pouch, or a small bowl on the wheel), you feel a sense of accomplishment and pride that’s hard to replicate in many other places. Each item, no matter how small, has history: the time you spent on it, the tweaks you made along the way, and the minor adjustments that defined its creation. Each becomes an heirloom of sorts, an artifact that demonstrates that time is moving, and even though you might not notice it from day to day, small advances are always being made. And, many people who step into a classroom or workshop as relative novices find that the biggest changes they note over time are not in the work itself, but in themselves.
Ultimately, I think working with one’s hands provides a unique and all-too-rare opportunity to feel a more pure sense of cause and effect. Each move produces a tangible result. Each decision manifests in a tangible way. There’s no screen between you and the results. No steps skipped or saved. No “hacks.” Just you, the work, and the process of getting better at it. In an age that distracts and disrupts our attention at every turn, working with one’s hands is an act of resistance, but more importantly, it’s an antidote.
