Could Go Either Way

I'm slightly in awe of people who are ambidextrous. Honestly, my handwriting is so bad with my right hand I can't even imagine being able to switch over and write legibly with the other one. The actual number of people who can do that is very low, but a larger percent can switch hands for certain activities, which is equally impressive. You hear about people who can do this in sports all the time - they are right handed in everything they do except throw a baseball, which they do left-handed and at 95 mph. We really should be making a bigger deal of this skill but instead it is casually mentioned, almost as a throwaway line, by the announcers as if it is totally easy to accomplish. Golfers who have gone years without improvement are even told they should just turn around and hit lefty. While I appreciate the humor of suggesting they couldn't hit it any worse, that doesn't sound like something which could be done without a ton of practice and if you are going to put that much time in you were probably going to get better regardless of which side you hit from. I know that I certainly won't be running out to check out a set of lefty club anytime soon, because that switch would take far too long.

I bring this up because of something which happened last night. I was making dinner and in the process burned a couple of my fingers on my right hand. The burn wasn't particularly bad (Quick cooking tip: steam gets really hot. And yes, I see the irony of this happening a couple hours after I finished a post about fire warnings. Karma is a bitch.), but was severe enough to sting and cause discomfort, so I wanted to keep those fingers in some cold water until the pain went away. Submerging them seemed to help a great deal. However, while I was doing this my dinner was, ironically, getting cold. Since I didn't this burn to have been happened in vain, I figured I would be able to keep my right hand off to the side with the burnt digits on ice and simply eat dinner with my left hand. It did not go particularly well. Actually, that is an understatement - it was more like my left hand and brain had never met before. Trying to get a forkful of rice was an exercise in futility - I may have done better with a remote-controlled arm. So, before too long I decided to just suck it up and wait to soak my fingers until after I had finished eating dinner with my normal right-handed action.

I was kind of frustrated at how poorly I had done trying to use my left hand at such a simple task, but was willing to chalk it up to the fact that I have used utensils this way my whole life. When you factor in three meals a day, I have probably eaten this way thousands of times - more than almost any other activity - making it among the hardest habit to break. Still, I was curious to see if I was going to have such trouble with every activity I tried to do left-handed. Throughout the day I decided to make a conscious effort to try smaller tasks like putting my wallet in the other pocket or arranging the money in my wallet with my left hand and see if it was any better, but it turns out they were just as awkward. Putting my wallet in my other pocket just made me worried I had dropped it. Also, when you are used to turning right most of the time, left is a pain. Turns out I'm not as flexible as I thought. Honestly, after 32 years of doing things one way my wrists just don't appreciate having to turn in new directions. They say the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice-versa. After today I have no doubt about which one of those is in charge.

However, the more I actually paid attention to which hand was in charge of which activity, I noticed I wasn't completely dependent on one hand. For example, I opened my car door with my left hand and it felt totally natural. Later my hands were full so I tried to open it with my right and I think people walking may have been concerned I was trying to break the door off. So, I think it has more to do with muscle memory than how my brain is wired. I'm sure if I felt like it I could practice using my left hand in more activities until I became proficient at it but I don't think this is that high of a priority - just something that I noticed which will bother me for a couple of days and then be forgotten about. (Although it would be awesome to be able to mean it when I say, "I know something you don't know... I am not left-handed.") Still, if I'm ever in the ocean and I see a shark coming I will make sure I punch at it with my left hand (That's how you get them to leave. Thanks, Shark Week!), because even though I'm positive I would eventually get quite good to doing everything left-handed, it is not something I really want to have to used to.