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Sarah Kaleem

Professor Hammond

Writing with Style

April 3, 2020

Dextra ac Sinistra Manu

Consider your hands for a long moment. A human hand has one hundred and twenty-

three ligaments. A human hand has forty-eight nerves. A human’s hands use one-quarter of the

brain’s motor cortex. Dextra ac sinistra manu, right and left hands, those in the medical

profession love their Latin, and their hands have touched many, all primates have them, more

than three hundred species of primates with their hands, clutching and guiding and waving in

order to communicate in a language nine times removed from words, your hands have said so

much over the years that compiling a dictionary would be a duty given to Sisyphus.

The muscles of your fingers alone hold tremendous strength. They can support your

entire weight. Your thumb moves in such a complex fashion, that there are six distinctive terms

for each direction movement. But when you change just one factor, the whole dynamic changes.

What about your fingernails? How often have you thought about them? The fingernail extends

deep beneath and behind the cuticle, nerves on the back of the finger around the cuticle sense

forces transmitted from the tip of the fingernail, the brain integrates the sensations from the

nerves of both the fingertip pad and cuticle to give a complex enhanced perception of pressure

and shear at the fingertips. And if you lose a fingernail, what happens? It changes how your

fingertips feel. Your perception of touch will change. Your reality shifts. Consider for a moment
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the paradigm shift in your life with the lose of just one fingernail. The whole world literally feels

different. The sensation you felt before and after are different, but the world stayed the exact

same. But to a human, the world is built upon our perception of it. If our perception of it

changes, then the world must as well. Consider what you have felt over your lifetime with your

hands: bubbly-delicate smiles and chaotic-frilly laughs, creamy-whipped frosting and crystalline-

unblemished jewels, knitted scarves and fleecy-woven sweaters, glossy-silky hair and intricate

carvings, ice-covered branches and rain-damp leaves, straw-like grass and frilled-lace hems,

satiny- soft bedsheets and syrupy happiness, each the most amazing sensation you have ever felt,

each a wild whimsical caress, each sensation gone, each sensation changed, a different reality.

Primates (this includes humans) have hands. Birds have wings and feet. Reptiles have

feet. Fish have fins. Insects have antennas. Unicellular bacteria have receptors on their perimeter.

We all have our ways of feeling the outside world. To feel it rush past us, for us to reach into it.

Every living being reaches out to the world for something. We are all trying to find connection.

So much is touched by our hands. So much is imprinted with our lingering touches. We

are always reaching out and taking without thought. How a gentle caress morphs into a sharp

shove. How those wandering hands become intruders, scratching at whatever they can grab. The

hand around your waist is no longer a sign of affection, but metal bar holding you in place. The

hands that are no longer comforting, the hands that were supposed to give you butterflies, but

instead leave burns. The hands that never get held. That hands that take something that was

never offered. Consider your hands and what you have done. Your hands have so much to give

to the world, but so many just wish to reap what is within reach. Your hands can give but so

many just choose to take. There are moments you can never wash off. We are all staining our

hands as we walk through this world, some of them burn.