A dream of hands

All efforts lead to the same end.

I had a dream where I was in a sunny living room with all the elders of my family. We were in the middle of a big family gathering and there were children and grandchildren running around.

I was performing a magic trick for the elders. I was pulling little child-sized hands out of my adult hands. With each glove-pulling-like motion, specters of mini hands would appear and hover in front of my fingertips. I pulled out hand after little hand till there was a long chain or ghostlike baby hands that looked like an extension of my own real hands. Then the grand finale, the punchline. I asked my mother to bring me a hacksaw and bottle of ketchup. I squirted the ketchup over my left wrist and using my right hand, proceeded to saw off my left hand, severing it from my arm. Then I asked my mother to saw off my right hand. I assumed my elders would understand the message behind this performance and laugh in recognition, but they looked at me like I was an idiot.

So what was the message in my dream performance? It is this: We are always trying to stay useful, making more hands (coming up with more ideas, business ventures, projects, making more children, buying more things) so we can do more, make more, be more creative and productive, or just stay occupied. But no matter how successfully we progenate, or how much we achieve, in the end we will all be rendered useless. We will all be made redundant through illness, pain (physical or psychological), grief, aging and death, and will eventually be excommunicated from the world.

Hands – a symbol of our utility as conscious beings. “Am I doing enough? Am I living in a way that makes me useful and beneficial to my family, society and fellow living beings?” we ask ourselves as we send our wishes and intentions out into the world, turning them into imaginary hands (that son, that business, that script, that meal, that cure for cancer) that we hope will save us from the abyss of uselessness and non-existence. We make and raise children, we write stories, we make pots, pictures, baskets, furniture and clothes, we build companies and brands, we tend to pets, livestock or gardens, we clean homes, we invent things, we heal and mend bodies and minds, we cook, and hoe and fix. These are the bells and the whistles of the ceremony of life. But are all these activities the purpose of me being here?

After performing my trick, I grin awkwardly like a thespian who’d just received a shower or rotten tomatoes. “Don’t you get it?” I say to my elders with my eyes. “It really doesn’t matter what you’ve done, how your kids turned out or didn’t, whether you did enough, how busy you were. You don’t need so many hands. You need only two. Your purpose was never to labor so tirelessly or try harder to be “good” or valuable. Your purpose was simply to press those palms together, raise your eyes to the sky, ask, and stop doing the magic trick.”