Created Dependence

Posted Jan 19, 12:34 PM by Kay Camenisch

My hand is out of the splint now and healing well. I wasn’t going to write about it again because it isn’t very significant—except to us—and I don’t want you to leave from boredom. However, I keep thinking about an amazing phenomenon I’ve observed over the last few weeks, so I’m writing about my hand one more time. Forgive me if I’m stepping over the line.

The doctor told me I couldn’t type for six weeks, so I had planned to stay away from the computer, to forget about writing. However, after checking e-mail a few times, it was obvious that I could type—with a functioning left hand and a peg finger of the right hand. My right hand fingers wouldn’t operate independently, so I’d aim with the long finger and hope it hit the right key.

Once I figured out I could do it, I typed a little bit nearly every day, even though it was slow. Capital letters were really a challenge. It took twice as long to type anything, and I often had three or four mistakes on a single line that I had to go back and correct.

During that time, I observed a fascinating phenomenon: the vast majority of typing mistakes were made by my left hand—the good hand—not the one that was limited to a one-finger punch! My left hand would skip letters, throw in extra letters, hit the Caps Lock instead of the shift key, and fail to hit the space bar sound enough to type a space. When I concentrated on doing better, I seemed to make even more mistakes.

When I got the splint off, I immediately remembered how to type and went back to my normal number of errors. The only thing I can figure is that without the right hand keeping up, the left hand was out of rhythm, or something of the sort. Even though they are hitting different keys, the two hands work together and are dependent on one another in order to do their individual jobs well. Our hands were created to need—to be dependent on—each other.

I couldn’t help but think of the church analogy. How many times have I questioned somebody else’s ability to do something well—when the whole time their problem may have been that I wasn’t pulling my weight beside them? Were they simply out of rhythm because they didn’t have needed support from the rest of the body? I fear that sometimes that is the case.