I was thinking about our hands today. Some thoughts:
- They’ve silently been through a lot…they’ve checked into fancy hotels, fixed the dirty pipes, clapped for a performer and reached out to touch someone else’s hand when words weren’t enough. And for how much wear and tear they get, they do pretty well! The whole “cell replacement system” God invented is incredible.
- In the average human lifetime, we wash our hands 246,543 times. That’s a LOT of hand-washing; nearly 2 months straight! Wrinkles form. But for all that, they look pretty youthful.
- Even though there are 10,000 to 10 million bacteria on our hands at any given time, we only get sick from them around 2 times a year. Our hands handle bacteria extremely well in three ways:
- The Skin’s physical barrier is the outermost layer that acts as a tight, waterproof wall that blocks bacteria from entering the body.
- Constant shedding; the “epidermis” completely renews itself every 4 weeks. As we shed millions of skin cells daily, the bacteria attached to them also come off.
- Microbiomes on the skin are constantly working to kill bacteria on the surface.
- Our brains dedicate significantly more neurons to managing your hands than it does to your entire leg or back. (If your body parts were drawn proportional to the number of neurons your brain dedicates to controlling them, you would have hands that almost doubled the entire body.)
We don’t talk enough about how important our hands are. Maybe hands deserve some gratitude.
“Give them a round of applause!”