Hands and minds

I took my Christmas trees down a little while ago. The process is a bit tedious and time-consuming. But I always love when it is done and put away. It feels like freshly-shaved legs…like you’ve lost a little weight, even. Everything is cleaner, crisper, and better.

Until the next morning.

I woke up with hands that were covered in little cuts and scrapes. Washing my hands hurt. Lotion stung even more. What the? I couldn’t remember scraping my hands! It didn’t make sense…but then I recalled the Christmas tree branches. Yes! Even fake evergreen needles can be sharp. Almost two weeks later, and my hands are close to being healed and back to normal. Our hands have a difficult time hiding what we have been doing. And sometimes, like putting away Christmas trees, the evidence shows up afterward.

A similar thing happened to me over the Christmas holiday when I was spending a lot of time in the kitchen. One of my girls asked me why my hands looked the way they did—stained a yellowish color. Um…it took me a moment to remember the inordinate amount of pomegranate seeding that I had been doing. Of course! It stained my hands for a few days afterward. Honestly, they did look a little gross, like my hands were perpetually dirty.

Yuck.

There are many examples of things that show up on our hands—the pruny, wrinkled fingertips from hours in the water, dirt under the fingernails from a day in the garden, blistered hands from lifting weights, stained or scented hands from a variety of things in the kitchen, or even a lingering smell of poo if you’ve changed a young kid’s pants (don’t even deny it. you know poo hands are a real thing 😂).

One incredible part of this is the consequences of what we have been doing show up later—not right away. My hands didn’t hurt when i was taking the trees down. Everything was fine. I promise, if they had hurt right away, I would have stopped immediately. Ouch! Something is wrong. I need to wear gloves, or do this differently. Instant reactions (especially the negative ones) usually change our behavior quickly. But nothing felt off and so I continued to wrestle my trees. The pain came later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Our minds work in a similar way. What you consume (read, watch, listen to, scroll by) affects your brain. Just like our hands don’t always have instant evidence, neither do our minds. But how you are spending your time results from how you think, how you talk to yourself and others, and how you behave. We cannot separate what we do from how we think. They are forever connected. We often drift along, not thinking much about our brains at all. But then life gets messy and you wonder how you got here. Just like the scratches showed up a day after I took down my trees, the consequences of mindless consumption all day appear later. Painful feelings of inadequacy and disappointment can overwhelm us not in the middle of watching endless reels, but afterward. Our thoughts create our feelings, and those feelings drive our actions. There is no getting around it.

However, our minds and our hands have a big, significant difference. While our hands don’t lie, our brains often do.

Yes, your brain lies, too.

I’ll give you an example from my own life. The first television show I ever binge-watched was 24, and I was ALL IN. It didn’t happen immediately. It took a few weeks of watching episode after episode late into the night with Brian until I woke up one morning and was still totally immersed in the show. When I asked Brian what he thought about the new policy of President Palmer….I paused, then chuckled in embarrassment. What had just happened?

I was watching SO MUCH 24 that my mind starting believing what I watched was true. And yet, I knew it was just a show. However, sometimes we believe things that are just as ridiculous, but we insist they are true. We tell ourselves we are stupid, or that we are not good enough. Our brains say we can’t do anything right—and we accept that it is accurate. The problem is that our brains lie, remember?

So what do we do?

• First of all, live your life on purpose. Choose what you are going to read and watch, and then decide how much time you are going to spend in those activities. Be intentional. It’s your story and your life.

• Remember that you are what you consume—this applies to food and everything else.

• Question what you’re thinking…believing something for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

Hands don’t lie.

Brains do.