Seven Questions to Write About the Hand Towel, From a Figurine Maker Who Wipes Off the Dough Before Using a Phone

My thumb was pressing the eyes into a little duck when the apron pocket buzzed.

The dough on my hands was soft, soft in the way that only lasts a moment, before the surface tightens and the eyes won't take to the duck's head any more. Rice-dough figurines are small animals shaped from dyed glutinous rice flour and stuck on bamboo skewers. I have made them at the weekend market for more than twenty years, sitting on a low plastic stool beside a foam box full of skewers, and not once has my hand been clean when the phone rang. The dough comes dyed red, yellow, green, black. Pick up a phone with those fingers and you leave four coloured prints on the screen.

So I wipe. An old muslin towel over my left shoulder, one finger, then the next, then between them, and only then do I take out the phone. That many small movements, every time, for years.

This piece is written from that towel. It is a set of seven questions for sitting down with a sheet of paper, not a lesson and not a technique. I came up with the questions from the times I wiped my hands, and from the times I didn't.

This is not an instruction to make your hands dirty before you pick up a phone. Nor is the towel some kind of magic. All I noticed was that between wanting the phone and holding the phone, in my case, there is a small gap made by my trade. Most people don't have that gap. The questions below are for finding out where yours sits, if it exists.

Before you pick up the pen

Not much to prepare: a sheet of paper, a pen, a place where your arm can rest on a flat surface. Leave the phone in another room if you can stand it, and if not, put it out of arm's reach. Write by hand, because for me hand on paper slows things down a little.

The first time I wrote like this was on a Monday morning, a market day off, at the small dining table, on the back of a torn-off calendar page, beside a loaf of bread nobody had cut. My wife had gone to the shop. I sat looking at the page for most of an hour before I could write the first word, and the first word was "towel".

There are three things I remind myself each time I sit down to write like this. No need to write well. Nobody reads it but you. And stop after the third line for each question, even if the thought isn't finished: a page full of words doesn't necessarily hold more truth than a page with three lines.

For three questions it takes about twenty minutes, if you're slow. You know you've done it right when the third line says something the first line didn't know. The first time, I finished and found all three lines were only description, like rereading a receipt. After a few sittings there was a line that made me stop the pen for a beat, and I didn't know where it had come from.

On a busy day, write one question, one line, no paper needed. Some days I only wrote on the back of a receipt, before gathering the skewers.

Where I stumble when writing is editing. I write a line, read it back, decide it isn't good, cross it out, rewrite it, and carry on until the three lines turn into something that is no longer mine. Now I write with a ballpoint pen, no eraser, because a ballpoint doesn't make fixing easy.

Seven questions

What you wipe your hands on before picking up the phone

Describe the thing you usually wipe your hands on before picking up your phone: where it sits, what it smells like, how it came to your hand.

My muslin towel has four old stains that never washed out, red, yellow, green, black, each in its own corner like a map of four countries. It was my wife's towel, she used it in the kitchen, then one day she left it on the foam box and I kept it. I never asked whether she needed it back.

For someone who doesn't work with dough, that thing might be the hem of a shirt, a trouser leg, a paper tissue. Nobody is wrong here. But there is something more interesting underneath: what you wipe on tells you whether you believe the phone has to be kept clean, or that your hands have to be kept clean in front of it. I don't yet know which is true for me.

A prompt for writing: three lines, one for the smell, one for where it sits, one for the person who handed it to you. The stumbling point is turning it into commentary on a habit. Just describe the object, the way you'd describe a chair, not your mood. The first time, I only had two lines, because I couldn't remember what the towel smelled of. I went and sniffed it. It smelled of rice flour, of sunshine, and one more thing I couldn't name. This question tends to get people up to go and find the real object, and I think that is also a way of answering.

The gap between wanting the phone and holding it

Write down, one by one, the small things that happen between the moment you want your phone and the moment it is really in your hand.

In my case the gap goes like this: put the skewer down, set the duck on the tray, wipe the thumb, wipe the forefinger, wipe between the fingers. It takes longer than people imagine. Long enough that sometimes I forget what I meant to look at.

People often say that to pick up the phone less you need willpower. Looking at this gap shows another way: many small things sit between wanting and having, and each one is a place to step out. For someone without such a gap, going from "want" to "have" is a single lift of the hand. I don't know whether the gap really changes anyone's mind. It has changed mine a few times, I didn't count.

Someone has written about pausing for three seconds before replying to a message, which is the same thing from another side: making a gap yourself in a place where the trade hasn't made one for you.

One day I wrote the line with the most steps in it for this gap and counted seven, and looking at it I felt strange: seven steps to pick up one device. I couldn't decide whether to laugh or feel sad.

A prompt: write it like a recipe, one short line per step, no commentary. Three lines is fine, four is fine. After a few tries I noticed the small steps don't come in the order I thought: some days I wiped first and only then remembered I hadn't put the skewer down, so I put it down and wiped again. For someone else the order may differ. The point of writing is to see your own order.

A job that got finished while you couldn't pick up

Remember a time the phone rang just when your hands were busy. What stayed intact because you couldn't pick up?

Once a woman bought a chicken for her grandchild while I was in the middle of its comb. The phone buzzed. I didn't take it. I finished the comb, pushed in the skewer, handed it to the child, and the child looked at the chicken for a long time without a word. Then I wiped my hands. The call was from an acquaintance asking about something that wasn't urgent. The child I will never see again, and I don't know whether it remembers the chicken. I do.

What I lose by picking up mid-task is not only a minute. A comb half shaped, if I leave it, will have tightened by the time I come back, and I'll have to redo it from the neck. I think of it like this: a job half done has weight, and that weight settles exactly where my hand let go.

A prompt: write one specific job, even one that isn't your trade, like cooking a pot of soup. The stumbling point is turning it into a lesson. A finished thing can just be finished, without drawing anything out of it.

The person who waited for you and didn't complain

Who has waited for your reply, or waited for you to look up, without saying a word? Write them three lines.

My wife waits for me at the table, chopsticks laid out, the soup already cooling a bit. I wipe the last finger, sit down, and she doesn't ask why I'm late. She never asked. For years I assumed that meant she hadn't noticed. One evening I asked.

"Do you mind?"

"Mind what?"

"That I sit here wiping my hands all the time."

"I thought you were thinking."

I wasn't thinking anything. I was wiping my hands, and she had waited for me all those years on that reason.

This question is not meant to make you feel guilty. It is meant to show who is standing outside the frame we tend to look into. The people who wait for us usually have no message line lighting up. They live in the silence of a dining table. There is a piece about eating a meal without your phone, and I think it is about exactly someone like my wife, in some other house.

A prompt: write as if for them to read, even if you don't plan to hand it over. Three lines: one describing them waiting, one saying what you see, one thanking them if you want. The stumbling point is apologising at length. A short thank-you is more truthful.

A small job for the hands, placed in between

If you could pick one small job for your hands to place between you and the phone, what would you pick?

I've been thinking about this for weeks. A friend who carves wooden statues said he wraps a rubber band around his phone every morning and has to take it off before he can use it. I asked him whether it bothered him.

"Of course it bothers me. But it bothers me in the right place."

"What do you mean?"

"The bother makes me ask: what am I opening this for?"

I thought that was a good idea too, but I haven't tried it, because I already have the towel.

The good thing about the question is that it doesn't ask you to give anything up. It asks how many seconds you're willing to spend on what. Washing a glass, turning a cup upside down, closing the lid of a box. A job the hands can do without the head having to think.

A prompt: write three candidate jobs, then cross out two and keep one. The stumbling point is picking something too big ("run five kilometres") and then never doing it. A job of about three seconds is right.

Where you let yourself get smudged, once

What is something you could let get smudged just once, hands not clean, task not finished, and it would honestly be fine?

Once I forgot to wipe. I picked up the phone with red dough on my hand and left a red thumbprint right in the middle of the screen, and the caller's name appeared on top of the print. I answered, and both sides of my face ended up smudged with colour too. After the call I looked at the print for a long while. It looked like my own seal.

The next day I wiped the print away with the corner of the green towel. But remembering that day, I often notice that I treat cleanliness as a condition, and that the very condition slowed me down, sometimes in a good way. What I am not sure about is whether, if I dropped that condition, I would keep that slowness. I'm also not sure whether the red thumbprint was merely a stain, or the one time I let the device see what my hands had been doing all day.

A prompt: write about one thing you keep very "clean" and ask what would happen if you let it get smudged. Three lines, decide nothing. The stumbling point is turning the question into a declaration: "from now on I'll be messy."

What is in your hand right now

Right now, what is your hand holding?

I'm holding a pen. A blue ballpoint, the plastic casing cracked where my thumb rests. My left hand presses the edge of the paper so it won't blow away.

Write one sentence. Just one.

Then put the pen down and look at your other hand for a while, to see what it does when nobody gives it a job.

If you sit down to write and the page stays blank

There are two things I've run into.

The first is that no words come, because the questions sound far from your life. This whole set was written from where I sit, the muslin towel and the rice flour, so for someone who has never had to wipe their hands, some questions slide off. Adjust: replace "towel" with whatever is closest to your phone each day, like a charger, a table, a shirt pocket. If none of the seven questions fits, you can throw out the whole set. The woman at the stall next to mine, who sells plastic goods, has never wiped her hands on anything before picking up a phone, and when I asked her the second question she looked at me as if I'd asked about something foreign. The question wasn't wrong. It was just mine.

The second is a question that lands on something heavy. Sometimes writing down the one who waits for you, the job left unfinished, brings something up from somewhere else. I'm not the person who can help with that, and neither is this piece. If any question weighs on you, stop there, move to another, or set the paper aside and talk to a friend you trust. There's no need to write all seven.

One more small thing people often ask me: what if you write and nothing seems to change. Same here, a few times. I don't think the paper has a job of changing anything. Some days it is only a place for a finger to sit down for a while, and that is enough for an afternoon.

In the evening I gather the skewers, wash my hands properly under the tap, and drape the muslin towel over the back rail to dry. Four corners of colour, each one its own country. The phone lies on the table, out of battery since morning, and I leave it there a little longer.