We have the whole world in our precious hands

February 9th, 2009, 3:49 pm · 1 Comment · posted by lawngriffiths

It was 1958 when the simple song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” became a big hit, literally across the world. In America, Mahalia Jackson recorded it, and that led to its wider use as a song in just about every kind of setting, especially as a campfire and youth group song. It was ecumenical and applicable everywhere.

“He’s got you and me brother in his hands, he’s got you and my sister in his hands…” and so it went. Very simple and no hidden message. Recently, when I became part of those whose jobs were eliminated in the Tribune’s major downsizing and reinvention, I marveled at my own hands and how much they had done in 63 years of life and, especially, 45 years of pressing the keyboard in basic journalism. Those fingers tap the lettered keys that I almost never look at. Of course, we have programmed it with our brains through steady practice. I can probably type 90 words a minute, but I have not tried to determine that for many years.

I would never suffer an accident that would break a bone, sprain a wrist or dislocate a shoulder, thus putting my craft as a writer out of action. I watched a good number of colleagues work around such injuries, improvising to work the typewriter or computer keyboard. My magnificent hands banged out millions of words on command. Since eighth grade when I first learned to type (I was required for all in my small Iowa school distict), I developed the proper typing techniques — not the hunt-and-peck method that some very veteran writers have used. One of my great prized possesions before computers was a Smith-Corona electric typewriter I purchased in an Army PX while in the Army in 1971. It would be such an important part of me for a couple decades.

I pounded on the keyboard a lot over these decades in both work, personal writing and lots of community projects, like reports and meeting minutes. Yet I never suffered carpal tunnel syndrome or related conditions that, for some, equired surgery, wrist supports or time off.

Of course, my hands — and your hands — have been summoned to do so much, that it defies making any kind of a master list. As a boy, they carried so many rocks out of the Iowa dirt and droppedhem on a “stone boat” to be taken to fill driveway potholes on the farm. Or they washed cows’ udders to ready them for the chore of milking.. They pulled weeds, clasped twine on bales of hay or straw, drove hammers, wrapped around baseball bats, caught high flies, clasped books that took me all the way through college and graduate school. They shook the hands of Ted Kennedy, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, George W. Bush, Shirley Temple Black and Ernie Banks, to name a few notables. My hands got slivers out of my kids’ fingers, wiped tears from their eyes and their behinds, held them as they were rocked to sleep and to get them dressed so many times, and showed them ow to pray. Now they do the same for grandchildren.

Not too many years after our marriage in 1973, it became impossible to get my wedding ring off my left hand because of a fattening finger, and so it has become a fixture there. I don’t think it will wear out and have to be replace.

My hands have been scraped in falls, bruised, caught in doors and bent backwards, but never enough to change my patterns. I have generally small hands that carried callouses when I was a farm boy but no longer have had the roughness of a working man’s hands.

On May 25, 1986, I led a group of about 80 people from my Tempe church to a milepost west of Phoenix on I-40 where we held hands and stretched out to form a link in “Hands Across America,” a grandiose idea to get people to form a human chain from America East Coast to the West Coast to raise awareness about hunger. There were never enough people, so there were huge gaps.

Surely our hands are part of our greatest possessions that make us human. They hand us the chance to enjoy the most in life. Let’s give our hands a hand.

Share this article: