The hand is a thing of many uses with both its drawbacks and advantages. Hands come in many different sizes, shapes, and sometimes numbers. From climbing walls to opening a can of soda, hands make our lives easier. Unlike the brain and the heart keeping our body functioning from the inside, hands help us get through our everyday lives by giving us functionality to the outside world. Everyone works daily. Whether they work as a construction worker or type at an office job, everyone works to be productive and progress in life. Both of these jobs require different skills, but both are accomplishable with the same hands. A hand is similar to a phone in that people expect it to serve a purpose. People depend on a phone that can make calls that allow “someone [to] [pick] up.” The phone booth in the Mojave Desert could function even in the desert, a place that is unexpected to have a phone booth. Like this phone booth, a hand can work and be dependable in many different situations, even ones where a person would not expect to be in, like picking off a piece of gum from the bottom of a shoe. 

Hands go through many changes and many different uses throughout a lifetime. As a child, hands might be used for counting, messily grabbing food, or hand paintings. As a person gets older, counting using fingers might occur less frequently, but they learn more uses for their hand, like using a pencil and writing. This cycle of learning new abilities by having hands-on experiences and leaving old ones behind happens perpetually. Even though the use of a hand changes as someone gets older, the hand will always be there. It might not be in the same condition, but a person with an adaptive mind and body will always find a use for their hands (if they still have them). Like Blair Somerville, a tinkerer that builds his creations using recycled materials, hands are used for anything a person wants.

Hands also go through all the achievements we have. Our hands feel the weight of a trophy we won, the firmness of a handshake when getting a job, and any physical representation of things we deem as an accomplishment. Hands go through all the pain as well. They feel cuts and bruises, along with tears when we rub our eyes. Through thick and thin, our hands stay with us.

Every high eventually has a low. As a person enters the elderly stage of their lives, their hands become softer, frailer, and worn down from all the years of work. Their hands, filled with experience, now have less use than before. The most they can do is use their hands to share and pass on the experiences and knowledge that they have gained throughout their lives. They introduce a new generation of kids into a world of creativity where they can do anything with their hands.