Making Do - Oct 25 2025

 

Making Do

Oct 25 2025

I sometimes watch my hands

at work

as if they’re disembodied;

unattached

and acting on their own.

No, they aren’t a farmer’s hands,

broad and fleshy

with the worked-in grime

that’s impervious to scrubbing.

But still, all lives are hard

and the signs unavoidable;

the calluses

and knobby joints,

bad nails

and jagged scars

left to heal on their own.

I notice the ageing skin

it’s too late to help,

slack and blemished

and close to the bone.

But also the skill they show,

from muscle memory

to millimetric control.

I notice the injuries

mapped on their terrain

like signposts

on my road-trip of life

I can travel in reverse

  — the knife that slipped

in a game of dare,

the nails I bit

waiting to hear,

and the knuckle 

that sucker-punched the wall.

I notice the touch

they’re capable of

and that sometimes scares me;

both the reaching out

and flinching from,

the neediness

that leads me who knows where.

Did evolution engineer the human hand

so precisely

it couldn’t be improved upon?

Are 5 digits

  — no more, no less — 

the optimal number?

Is the angle between finger and thumb

the best possible?

And why a pinkie

shorter than the rest?

Why didn’t mother nature

make a hand strong enough 

to crush steel;

a hard touch

to complement the soft?

Or, given how we abuse the power

we have even now,

would that be too much

for the things we hold dear

and people we love?

Far more likely

it was accident and randomness

over vast stretches of time.

Which is how evolution

came up with the platypus

as well as with us

with all our quirks and flaws

  —  by making do

and seeing what works.

As if design studio

kept throwing jelly against the wall

just to see what sticks.  

So I suppose a man smarter than me

could come up with something better.

A purpose-built instrument

of flesh and blood,

the Swiss army knife of hands.

Or even better, a titanium one,

with finely jewelled gears

carbon-fibre tendons

and lab-grown skin.

Clockwork hands

programmed precisely. 

As for me, I’m content as is.

Hands so familiar 

I rarely notice them,

and hands that have served me well

these many years.

I’ve stopped watching now.

My eyes are on the screen

as my hands type away;

missing keys

or double-tapping them,

stopping to scratch

or run one through my hair.

Working hands,

imperfect as they are.

Hands say a lot about a person. They embody personal history. They keep us in touch with the world. They’ve allowed us to build a technological civilization, and — through writing — save, transmit, snd amplify knowledge. 

This poem began with the farmer’s hands of the second stanza, inspired by a photographic essay in the weekend Globe on the loss of the family farm. It included an image of the hand of the author's father, and the caption under it contained the description “ …blackened, dried, and cracked by manual labour …”.  That set me off. (Unfortunately, I can’t reproduce the photo here.)

https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/282235197651169

I’ve been wondering why everyone’s building humanoid robots, which doesn’t strike me as necessarily the optimal conformation. Is it because familiarity makes human looking robots less scary? Domesticating them, you could say. Is it because they fit into world built for bodies of our size and shape? Or because we labour under the conceit that we couldn’t be improved upon? That we are the ultimate product of evolution?   . . . As if!

Hence the digression into evolution. Because the hand is probably not optimal. After all, it’s the product of a hit and miss process that makes do; that manages to repurpose traits that were selected for one thing and then use them for another. A series of kluges and approximations. Evolution isn’t planned. It has no intent. There is no such thing as a more or less evolved creature, as depicted in the so-called evolutionary tree (with us, naturally, at the top): there is only better or less suited to the environment an organism finds itself in. Yes, intelligence can be stratified. But if an animal does perfectly well without our intelligence, is it necessarily “lower”? Just because we privilege intelligence is no reason to think evolution does.