My left hand
Biking home after work today, I caught myself steering with one hand — my left. And it felt good.
I am right-handed. Ask me to do anything, from opening a can to lifting a bag or grabbing a stack of paper, and my right hand will be on it without thought or hesitation.
I have recently become more conscious about this as I am beginning to detect what I fear are the first, faint signals of arthritis in my right thumb. I am only turning forty later this year, so it’s rather early to develop this kind of ailment, but arthritis runs in the family and I stand a fair chance of being confronted with it sooner or later. My very first thought was: oh no, not my writing hand! I still write by hand almost daily, and with great pleasure. I like my handwriting, I love the feel of a pen on paper, and my thoughts flow in a different way when they are asked (or permitted) to move more slowly on their way to the surface. Pain or no, there’s no way I’m giving that up anytime soon.
I would gladly delegate more to my left hand. I tried pruning with my left hand over the weekend, holding last year’s stems with my right, and that worked quite nicely. But that does not cancel the fact there are very few tasks I can perform better with my left hand than my right. Except: steering a bike (or a car).
This has of course a very simple and logical explanation. Being right-handed, when I am riding my bike and I have to perform any other kind of task (digging a handkerchief from my pocket, pulling my hood over my head) I will automatically do this with my right hand, leaving my left hand in charge of the seemingly uncomplicated process of keeping the bike steady. Driving a car in Europe almost automatically includes learning to shift gears, which occupies the right hand a fair part of the time, leaving the steering — again — to the left hand…
Years of training have actually made my left hand far better at keeping course and steadying the bicycle than I realized. I noticed recently how much more smoothly I rode when my left hand held the steering wheel as I dug into my right coat pocket, then when I needed something from my left pocket and had to entrust the steering to my right hand. A similar pattern has installed itself driving a car.
How fitting, I thought. How beautiful.
It somehow feels very appropriate that my right hand — my yang, active, male side — would be doing the active, outward tasks, shaping the form of my actions in the physical world around me. And all the while something else is happening in the background, continuously, going on almost unnoticed: my left hand — my intuitive, sensitive, feeling side — is steering, holding a steady course.
This is how life works for me, I guess. My right hand gets on with what needs to be done, and the job of inner compass keeping me on course I have entrusted to my intuitive side, and it is doing great: it is sensitive, solid and reliable, and my ride under its guidance is smooth and true.
It is an enchanting ride.
