What My Hands Know That I Don't

This is going to sound strange, but I think my hands know things that the rest of me doesn't.

When I crochet, I don't always think about what I'm doing. Not anymore. In the beginning, every stitch was deliberate — yarn over, pull through, count, count, count. But now, after thousands of hours, my hands just... go. They know the rhythm. They know when the tension is off before my eyes can see it. They know how to fix a mistake before my brain has even registered that something went wrong.

My grandmother used to say that skill lives in the hands, not the head. She was a seamstress in Delhi — not the fancy kind, just a woman with a sewing machine and a gift for making beautiful things out of whatever fabric she could find. She could cut cloth without measuring, her hands just knew where the scissors should go.

I think about her a lot when I'm crocheting. She passed away before I started Kaira, so she never got to see any of this. But I like to think she'd understand. She'd get why I sit for hours making something by hand when I could be doing literally anything else. She'd know that feeling — when your hands are moving and your mind is quiet and the world shrinks down to just you and the thing you're making.

There's a word for this that I learned recently: proprioception. It's your body's sense of where it is in space. But I think there's a deeper version of it — when your hands develop a memory of their own. A muscle memory that goes beyond just movement. A memory of love, of care, of attention.

Every bag I make carries that. Not just yarn and stitches, but thousands of hours of my hands learning, failing, trying again, getting better. When someone holds one of my bags, they're holding all of that. They're holding what my hands know.

I'm fourteen. My hands have maybe sixty or seventy more years of making things ahead of them. I can't wait to find out what they'll learn next.