I spent some time plastering my bathroom redo this weekend. You have now heard from me at least 1,245 times about my love of Italy, stone walls and buildings, statues, and architecture, and how strongly I feel that beauty is vital for all of us. While I am certainly no Vasari, I try to dip my hand in some artistic pursuits as much as possible. It is a close race between stone masonry/wall building and plastering when it comes to seeing reward from working with my hands. While the latter is certainly more of an artistic endeavor (and Aurelia was calling me Botticelli when I finished), the sheer mental and physical work that goes into properly planning and executing a stone wall makes it tough to beat. Either way, I finish both feeling an incredible sense of accomplishment. These activities also seem to extract the stress from my mind like a thirsty sponge. Unlike most of our corporate workplaces, these activities may make us physically tired, but leave us mentally invigorated. The benefits are tough to quantify.
Working with our hands alongside nature to create something tangible, beautiful and gratifying, and gaining rewards in the process… This once given aspect of daily life seems like a part of our distant past as we spend most of our day staring at computer screens and sending emails. Even our “creations” are often digital documents that rob us of a tangible result that we can hold and admire leading to the reward areas of our brain to fire like a series of fireworks on the 4th of July. We now have to purposely seek out opportunities to use our hands (and often our brains).
While finishing my plaster masterpiece, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tangible changes we have seen in our Exercise Oncology facilities. Yes, we built two beautiful centers, but the sculpting that continues is astounding. Six pounds of muscle in 3 months!!! The insanity in this change is hard to overemphasize. Ten pounds of fat loss! If this is not an incredible tangible change from working with our hands, then I don’t know what is.
We have few opportunities these days to work with our hands and produce a tangible result. Lifting heavy weights to move, look, and feel better gives us that opportunity, while ultimately improving our health (and especially the health of anyone overcoming cancer).
We may not be Renaissance masters, but we are certainly given the tools to produce beauty like they did. The difference is, we are the tangible product.
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