#chapstickvideography

Instead of writing cover letters for potential jobs that I’m not even really sure I want, I’m sitting in the dark on the commercial of NBC’s “Parenthood” deciding which picture I should choose for my next blog post.

Yeah, you caught me - I don’t always take each picture the same day I post on the blog. 

This project to find hands of all shapes and sizes was simply a task I gave myself to accomplish every day. 

While I would like to say this October challenge came to me as some sort of prophetic action I found appropriate to take as I was seeking the true meaning of every day life, I’ll just go ahead and be honest here: graduating college is frightening.

The struggle is real. 

Finding a project I could enjoy, illustrate and share was my artistic structure. 

These hands are my sanity. These hands are my focus. These hands have allowed me to write through my own experiences as I share new ones finding hands to photograph.

Which leads me to something else that happened along the way. Earlier this month I realized how I could take pictures of hands, possibly get to know the hands and learn something from them. Observing the hands wasn’t my only goal here - that would just be weird.

Everywhere I go on photo safaris I found unique things that hands are doing  - the actions and the meaning behind their actions. We use our hands for everything for goodness sake, why haven’t we been paying attention to them?

I found hands I knew, hands I have a loving relationship with, hands I barely knew, hands who I found attractive, hands who were just plain strange and hands that have more to say than what they appear to be voicing. 

Sometimes I would dedicate a twenty minute part of my day to writing about the hands I knew and most other times I would just find it easiest to brief the reader on who these hands are and who they belong to.

What became most dynamic for me in this was finding hands who had the simplest things to say to the world - the same hands that have the stories we’ve all been meaning to express.

Simple hands, simple concepts, simple perspectives.

And don’t worry it gets better - I actually turned the project in to writing I actually enjoy doing. Crazy, I know. (Take that, mass comm professors)

In the search for hands to focus on, I found myself thinking about more than what these hands are acting out, but more so how our hands are guides to what we really seek to become with our time. 

What I found is that hands are metaphors and if you let them, they can be really cool analogies for what we’re climbing towards.

Sometimes our hands are stronger than we think they are.

Plot twist: I’m actually going to incorporate today’s hands picture in with what I’m rambling about right now. 

I realized today, this fine day of the Fall season, that our hearts, our minds, our hands, our thoughts and our everything can so often depend on lines guiding us to what we want to be, see or even hear that we forget they were there in the first place.

This dude in the picture, for example, I don’t know his name, but at some earlier point in his life he learned to slap the bass using frets. He had to learn the guidelines for the bass clef and what was going with the notes on paper and the frets in order for his hands to learn the instrument.

Along his musical journey he found that the frets weren’t necessary.

How we define our success changes, how we live our every day changes, how we love one another changes. 

The lines begin to change.

Maybe we choose to remove the lines because we’ve grown out of them or maybe we wake up one day and realize the lines are no longer doing us any good.

So what if we took more risks and went beyond the lines? What if we thought outside of the box? 

In my search for the hands of October I found that the most unique hands are the ones with ideas, actions or thoughts outside of the box. The unique hands belong to those who live without lines defining them. 

Therefore, my scientific conclusion is we should all be aware of the power of ours hands and where they can take us. 

These hands that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting briefly, loving or knowing my entire life are influential to my own hands.

For this I am thankful.

Thanks for following along. I hope to continue this journey through the rest of October and through the calendar year. 

Peace be with you.

October Twenty fifth.

www.heathermae.net