Response to article on working with your hands.

This article reminded me of my last couple of years in the Toronto area ("GTA," locally) and my experience there with the labor force. I was active in the trades, mostly as an interior painter, but was associated with a company that did disaster mitigation work for insurance companies. I was often surprised when going on to a job site that most of the tradesmen were my contemporaries. I was pushing 60 at that time, so you get the picture. There were a few younger people on site, but mostly they were people who couldn't find an "electronic" job or who were otherwise computer challenged.

I don't think it was mi imagination, because almost daily there were non-commercial pleading through the media for people to enter the trades. This was backed by many news reports that, despite the wages of blue collar workers approaching or equalling some college supported jobs, there was a dearth of tradesmen and women. This is anecdotally confirmed by friends I hear from now who live there and can't find a plumber or painter or whatever who can do a job satisfactory even to the unpracticed eye of a homeowner.

For my part, though I've done a few stints at the keyboard and screen, I have worked mostly with my hands in the construction trades. I owned and operated a landscape design/installation company specializing in xeriscapes and water features (there's a contradiction for you!) and did a great deal of household renovations as well. I was younger then, able to swing a pick for most of a day in 110F on hardpan surrounded by white walls, if called to. Not any more, lol!

But I always remember the satisfaction at the end of a day. Whether it was a coat of gloss paint on a wall that showed no roller marks in the glare, or the sound of three tones of water falling into a fishpond we just finished. That was, interestingly enough, a great contrast to the drudge I felt in office jobs where the chief satisfaction was usually social, in that I got along well with co workers and management or not.

The choice is easy for me. There is clarity, virtue, and reward in working as a team with competent craftsmen. There is fulfillment in seeing something that was not long ago "just" an idea take shape not only before your eyes, but under your hands. There is a connection between the imaginative, cognitive, and technical skill realms of experience that precipitates a feeling of wholeness.

I can't work now like I did then, I'm 62 years old and feel some of the symptoms of six decades of engagement with the world and its personal exigencies. But I still work with my hands, doing painting, some building trades, and most interestingly, work in ceramic art that is moving into a satisfying realm of recognition even in this economy. For me the case for working with your hands is moot. It's been my life. My hands, looking at them, is a history of my labor and my love of expression. The scars are there from tool cuts to surgery for removal of cactus spines. The texture is there from exposure to sun in the Sonoran desert for 23 years to thick spots where mortar burned my skin. The feeling is there from an iv that nearly wrecked a nerve to the occasional twinge from what I hope isn't incipient arthritis.

We all have ours stories. If it is true that Romans were allowed citizenship by the calluses on their hands, I would have made the cut. But mostly I feel the rewards of complicity to the demands of using skills best expressed with my hands. When I shake hands with another tradesman, farmer, craftsman, artist or musician, there is a feeling of respect and gratitude that flows through those fingers and palm that, like mine, have a treasured grip on reality.