Hands of Fate,
by Clifforf Thurlow

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        My hands have a mind of their own. They draw on memory and experience to press the keys that spell the words you are reading with your eyes and transfer to your brain to unscramble, savour, counter and store.

Hands find the light switch in the dark. They find the itch that needs to be scratched. The hands on the clock never stop. They tick off time, measure our days. Hands are like the winds and tides, rarely still. We may share our mother’s eyes and our father’s nose, but our palms and fingerprints are unique. It is where destiny is written.

Hands make us human. Our relatives, the monkeys and apes, lack the agile thumbs and sensitive fingers Michelangelo required for carving the David, Picasso in painting Guernica, John Lennon playing Imagine.

The piano requires ten fingers, but a solitary digit can pick out blame, point at the villain. You can give someone you don’t like the finger. Or a fist. A little boy’s digit in the dyke saved Holland from flooding. Those without hearing or speech sign with curling fingers and swirling hands.

Many hands make light work. Clean hands inspire confidence. Just as getting your hands dirty has its own malign meaning. The hand that rocks the cradle can carry a gun. The future in our hands is slippery like an electric eel. The future in our hands is a roll of the dice. If the future in our hands is a block of ice it is slowly melting.

Pontius Pilate washed his hands after the trial of Jesus. Oedipus with his bare hands ripped out his own eyes when he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. Robert Oppenheimer wrung his hands when he looked out over the New Mexico desert after the test explosion of the first atomic bomb. He quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

The future in our hands is small and fine and fragile. If we decide to take ourselves to nothingness, a fingertip is all that’s required to press the red button.

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