#162 | Embrace the Shake – 1,000 Leaps
In high school, a young man named Phil discovered an art form called pointillism. He plotted thousands of dots in a pattern so that when viewed from afar, the dots looked like an identifiable image, like a person’s face.
But years later, when Phil attended art school, a shake began to develop in his hand. He was shocked that he could no longer draw straight lines, and the dots he plotted looked like tadpoles. At first, Phil compensated with willpower and held the pen tighter to gain control of the tremor. The effort, however, made the shake worse: the tighter he held on to the pen, the more pain he experienced around his muscles and joints. He saw it as the “destruction of my dream of becoming an artist.” Devastated, Hansen quit school to leave the craft behind.
Phil became an X-ray technician. However, his desire to return to art gnawed on. A few years later, he saw a neurologist, who diagnosed him with permanent nerve damage in his forearm. The doctor looked at Phil’s squiggly line and asked, “Why don’t you embrace the shake?”
