The right hand of George Nakashima, furniture maker extraordinaire, against the grain of a live-edged table he has made.
We have moved now through the social engagement complex that Stephen Porges identified, and which localizes the neural architecture of connection online when a baby is born. We now move into the neural architecture of the connection system that establishes itself in the womb-with-a-view period: the first 18 months of life, before the closing of the fontanelles. I will not necessarily do this in the order in which the circuits myelinate, but rather in the motion of a gestalt. This transition from the core architecture (social engagement system) that unites the first of the infant’s connection portals so that an attuned caregiver can see into the felt interior of the infant, and keep them alive, is the neural architecture that births attachment. We now move to the portals that complete the embodiment of connection.
If you meditate on the origins on the human species, deep in the mists of ancestral time, and you reflect on what distinguished us from other animals, there is the movement to walking upright on two feet (7 million years ago), which rotates the hips in such a way that we are now looking out, looking forward, looking toward the future rather than toward the ground– and there is the intricate use of the hands. (There is also language, about which we’ve already spoken.)
Our hands are magnificent. Take a look at them. Able to grip and grasp with great force, they are also capable of learning to make movements that are almost unimaginably refined. Our opposable thumbs give us tremendous dexterity. The hands can strike, and they can caress. Guide a jackhammer or fold oragami. Wield a sword or a paintbrush. Wield a sword like a paintbrush and a paintbrush like a sword. Just, wow.
An experienced surgeon or painter or tennis player is able to control the movement of their hands with a precision so exact as to be breath-taking. To use a scalpel in such a way that it cuts through exactly the tissue required and no more, or to paint the finest line that is perfectly straight, or to take the pace off a blistering 100 MPH forehand and arc a dropshot crisply inches over the net–in each of these cases the intelligence of the hands is extended through a tool that merges with and transforms them into instruments of something else. In this example, one tool is a form of knife, one a form of brush, and one a form of racquet–yet each merges with and amplifies the capabilities of the hands– a modern tool that extends our abilities in a way that harks back to our most ancestral roots.
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