Soft Hands

I miss Bill Lawry. Growing up in the 1980s, Lawry and his fellow Australian TV cricket commentators on Channel Nine were as much part of my summer as the heat and long, aimless days. Now, inevitably, age has wearied him to the point he appears only for the Boxing Day test match once a year in his native Melbourne.

Lawry’s excitable manner was a foil for the more emotionally reserved commentators like Ian Chappell and Richie Benaud. Whenever something important happened on the field, like the fall of a wicket, he’d snap out a simple but ebullient response: “Gone! Out! Yes, he’s gone!" An umpiring mistake would elicit, “Dear oh dear, umpire! Dear oh dear!”

One of Lawry’s compliments for a player who had taken a good catch was to declare they had “soft hands”. Of all his commentary, looking back on it, I find it the most interesting. He would say this particularly about a catch taken close to the bat, like in “the slips” when the ball would dart into a nest of waiting fielders.

Soft hands were a prerequisite to field well in cricket – a player had to make sure their hands were not tense or rigid but supple and yielding. You also had to let the ball come to you and not snatch at it, not move too early or too late with your hands but just let the ball fall into them. Someone whose hands were not prepared to receive the ball would likely drop it, which could ultimately mean the difference between their team winning and losing.

Positioning is the other crucial factor on a cricket field. To catch the ball you either have to be in the right position if standing near the batter or be able to move to the right spot once the ball is in the air if you are in the out-field. In the slips, if you stand too close to another fielder you can spoil each other, too far apart and the ball flies between the two of you; stand too far away from the bat and the ball falls in front of you, too close to the bat and the ball is impossible to catch. Being in the right position is critical.

There’s a lot to be said for the wisdom of cricket. We tend to think that our lives need to be forged heroically out of the turbulent mess of existence for us to be successful; that we have to struggle in spite of external conditions to get what we want, elbowing our way in competition with nameless others. I think that’s the wrong notion. The essence of a good life is to be in the right position to receive it and to take it with soft hands.

To be sure, the right position does require work and knowledge. In life, the work is a journey of self-discovery in which the aim is to reach the centre of one’s being. This centre is the source of meaning and goodness in an individual, the inexhaustible fountain from which their life springs. From it all else comes: a purposeful career, relationships, friendships, indeed a whole life’s work. Most of us have to go looking, gaining it through the rigours and knocks of everyday living, through therapy or some kind of internal practice, through self-examination and understanding. We come to know more about our personality and how it can serve this centre. Of course, many of us don’t take the path let alone come close to the goal.

The paradox in the process, as wisdom traditions tell us, is that you arrive where you started – that is, with the personal and universal gifts you had all along. The importance of the journey is actually in the development and refinement of the vehicle that serves the centre, the body and mind that is capable of using the inner gold for its full benefit. To those of us within its radiance for any length of time, being there seems effortless, the grace of the universe natural and boundless. Yet spiritual or ultimate reality cannot be realised in the temporal world without some process of translation; the right position requires no work and yet it needs the effort of Hercules to get there.

Having soft hands is being able to receive the nourishing grace that is the endowment of all created beings. Religious traditions have always had their eye on grace, always sought to build a relationship with the divine light that is the succour of life. We can open to grace through prayer and religious ritual but equally it can be recognised and appreciated in the many ordinary-special moments of each day: in the red-flecked purple clouds of the sky at sunrise, in the smile and joy of a child, in the satisfaction of work done well, in the kindness of strangers. What’s needed is an openness of heart, eyes attentive to the beauty of the world, soft hands.