Holding Hands–Reaching out to the Characters in YOUR Story.

I lay by my son as he falls asleep. He curls his small cherub 4-year-old body next to mine and he wraps his little hand around my thumb. “I love you too,” he says. Then follows it with, “Say that to me.”

As children we come into the world ready to grab hands, but having a hand only large enough to grab a finger – we start by wrapping five tiny fingers around the larger one of a caregiver –we do it without hesitation as we figure out how to reach out and connect, hold on to one another. In the case of my son, we even ask for what we need. As we get older we are much more careful about breaking those boundaries. We are careful to stay in our own spaces and too often we forget to reach out to one another. Today’s podcast is about connecting with touch: it’s about holding hands and how human touch links us, literally closes the gap between people, and how important that is – to all of us.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.

Last week we spoke about random acts of kindness and the stories we can participate in by keeping our eyes open for small, kind, daily acts. This week, we’re talking about holding hands.

There is a photo of me with my two sons, the youngest sitting on my lap, my hands unintentionally wrapped with his, our fingers interlaced, my thumbs caressing the backs of his soft, sweet, pudgy, three-year-old hand. It’s not something we pay attention to, just something we do.

In another memory, we cut our way across the Albertson’s parking lot and he hollers, “Mom, hold my hand so I don’t get run over.” His voice is high and sweet, and as quickly as I take his hand he decides he wants to brave it on his own and practice stepping over cracks.

A dance takes place as we interact. We reach out, we pull back, we want to know we are not alone, but we don’t want to be held back either. It’s a tricky two-step.

To hold someone’s hand is to connect: to offer friendship, protection, comfort, to make your way undivided through a crowd, to guide, to show affection. The Beatles sang “I want to hold your ha a and.” And the world sang with them.

In a world where we can feel alone in a sea of a million people, the chance to hold another’s hand can be a gift, an anchor, a place where for that moment you are not alone. For that moment you are joining forces. A joining of hands is a human action that allows us to connect, communicate, and exchange energy in a meaningful way. For however long the moment lasts we are unafraid to touch. And that is a beautiful moment.

I sat on a plane, flying home from Ohio, after our final weekend in an emotional intelligence workshop that had lasted 3 months. The people in that workshop had become family, and I lived thousands of miles away, in Utah. There was a good chance I wouldn’t see most of them again.  We spent months working together on projects and learning, through the good and the bad, how to work together, play team, and love each other. After plenty of annoyance, quiet thoughts of frustration, numbers of calls to my life coach, I am proud to say that I finally came to a place of loving each of my team members for exactly where they were, taking them for their good and their bad and loving them in their own space – without...