Handle
I’ve been playing around with an idea the last couple of months—something to hopefully try to avoid hand and wrist problems that plague a lot of us who spend an inordinate amount of time at a computer. And it’s a little more fun and less onerous than a purposefully uncomfortable chair.
“Stress balls” are a generally accepted tool for relieving hand and arm tension and also billed as a way to take a break from computer work to prevent repetitive stress injuries. But I feel like they’re limited: they’re typically super-squishy and small enough to be unobtrusive on your desk, which means that they’re one-handed devices. (And sometimes they have annoyingly cheerful messages on them: “Life’s a journey, not a race!” Ugh...)
One of the interesting capabilities of humans is brachiation: the ability to support one’s body by hanging from the hands. We don’t do it much spontaneously, as a species, because we don’t live in trees anymore. (Kids do, and they’re to be encouraged!) Some of us do pull-ups or gymnastics, but most of us simply don’t have a reason to hang from a branch or a bar anymore. Which is too bad, because hand strength is something that’s very useful in everyday life, and hanging from a bar is a great way to develop it.
So, how about a stick? Nothing fancy, just a stick that’s maybe an inch or so in diameter. It could be part of an old broom or mop handle; it could be a hammer handle or a piece of sturdy PVC pipe. It could be a broken branch. Just something small enough that you can get your hand around it, stout enough that you can’t break it and long enough that you can grip it with both hands.
(This one just happens to be oak. “How about you, Jimmie? You an oak man?”) Here’s the cool part: take it in both hands.
Squeeze it. Hard.
Try to bend it. Now bend it in another direction. Hard.
Try to wring it out like a wet towel.
Try to pull it apart. Try to push the ends together.
Now grip it so that your thumbs are pointing the same way and try #1-4 again.
Now grip it with both palms up (thumbs pointing away from each other) and run through #1-4 again...
There are a lot of ways to use this very simple tool while sitting at your desk.
There are times when I want to take my computer mouse in my hand and crush it into a fine powder. (I’m not sure I really could, but it’s a recurring fantasy.) This gives me something else to squeeze so that I don’t have to have awkward conversations with our IT guy. It can sit on my desk, almost completely unnoticed. And I can fidget with it and squeeze/bend/twist/pull it while I’m thinking about how to re-word that email or figure out what order those slides should be in.
Best of all, it doesn’t need any optimistic aphorisms on it. It’s just a goddamn stick. If you make one yourself and it just has to have a label, I would suggest it simply say, “handle”: both in the noun and the verb sense. That’ll get it done.