I’m lucky to have two hands, let’s be clear, and the minor struggles I’ve had with them over the years don’t qualify as any kind of real hardship. Yet there have been a lot of small injuries — an ongoing annoyance made worse by being mostly my fault.
Consider the most recent incident. To relieve strain on my left hand, I switched a few months ago from a steel-string to a nylon-string guitar. I knew I wanted the lesser force required to press nylon strings, and the vacation from steel strings has really helped. The wider spacing between the strings is also better for my hands, I realized as I settled in. I’d started on a classical guitar, then hadn’t owned one in decades, it feels good to have one again and I’ve been playing it a lot.
Being the guy who wrote a blog post about an early warning system for RSI not even six months ago, I see the absurdity of my situation. Back in July I was rehabbing an overextended little finger. Now I’m rehabbing a thumb and related muscles insulted by my failure to properly adapt to the new instrument.
You can wrap your thumb around the narrower neck of a steel-string guitar in order to grab the lowest string. You can do that with the wider neck of classical guitar too. But as I probably learned the first time and then forgot, you really shouldn’t. A D major chord with F# in the bass is too much of a stretch for the thumb, at least for my thumb, on a classical guitar. You won’t see classical guitarists do that. Instead they’ll make a tripod with the index, middle, and ring fingers.
So once again I get to rewire my hand posture. Which, again, is a minor hardship, not remotely comparable to the guy I mentioned last time who had to switch sides and learn to fret with his right hand. As I also mentioned there, he found an upside. Now he’s a switch-hitter who can use both halves of his brain directly. In my case, I’m trying to embrace the rewiring as a way to break a habit and form new neural pathways. It’d be nice, though, if that weren’t always a response to self-inflicted injury!
But like I said, it’s a minor hardship. My hands could have been mangled in my dad’s car engine that one time, or in the anchor chain of Ben Smith’s boat that other time: two escapes from disaster that still provoke the occasional nightmare. I’m lucky to have these two hands, and again vow to take better care of them.
Why is it so hard (for me, at least) to detect and avoid injurious hand postures? I guess it’s because whatever you’re projecting — when you write sentences or lines of code, or play notes and chords — has to flow through your hands with minimal conscious attention to your hands. Note to self: pay more attention.
