A PAUSING PRACTICE FOR NEW YEARS

My Dad made temples, no, more like churches with steeples with his stout hands. He intertwined his pinky, ring and middle fingers and made a tent with left and right pointer fingers which he tapped, tips touching, thumbs like steeples too. He’d lay both hands like that on his lap while watching televised PGA golf and on his belly while lying on his back. 

Sometimes, I’d ask him a question—“how do you stay so calm in golf tournaments?”   

He’d pause, place his first fingers on his lips, bow his chin a little. The tips of the thumbs touched each other and rested on his chest, on his heart. I had the sense he was listening inwardly even as he listened outwardly to me. I don’t remember his words, although I felt, early in life, that a certain language lived in his short silences. I do remember how his hands seemed to help him pause before he answered. 

He used to say to us, “You gotta have sand. Find your sand. Feel your sand.” What he meant was that we needed what those bop bags taught. They were life-size plastic clowns, anchored at the bottom with sand. When we punched them, they fell and, because of their sand, they popped back up, balanced and reset. I think now that Dad felt his sand, his gravity, when he clasped his hands together.

His hands were almost like that when we viewed his recently-deceased body. On a plain white sheet, he was draped in a simple blue and white hospital jonnie, his face pale. Bob, the funeral director, one of his golf buddies, knew Dad’s various hand positions, grips on the driver and putter included. Bob had arranged Dad’s hands in the church with steeple position. We sobbed, “Good job. That’s Dad.”

To me, “That’s Dad” was in the hands, his now thin fingers folded together, palms touching. Seeing him in a different form of peace, I remembered the peace I felt when I saw him in life gathering in his energy with his hands. I imagined it was a way for him to feel gravity in the body. Grounded. Sand.

When I pause in my busy days to reset into balance, I put my hands together, and I feel him.  It’s a paradox, I suppose. I have learned the kindness of holding hands with myself. And the tented fingers signal how I can point to something that is not self. I can, we can, ground in human self-contact and also feel the hands as connection to other people, to us, to we. Inward and outward at the same time.  

I am reminded of the short rhyme we chanted as children, how we started with hands closed. Then we turned the wrists inside-out to show all our fingers as we sing-songed, “Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the door and see all the people.”  

Temples, churches, steeples. Maybe there is something holy in how we can honor the communion of our own sand, and also a greater web of relationships. As adult, I now feel both, especially as I put my thumbs to my heart and take what might be a sacred pause. Of course, the secret in the hands has been here all along. 

Maybe for a New Year’s Resolution, instead of, or in addition to those things we promise we will do in the future, we could fold our hands even for a few moments. And maybe, in that pausing and hand holding, we could feel our sand. Maybe we could feel what grounds us, balances us, here and now before we promise to change ourselves.