The sound of one hand clapping

When I heard the title of this post for the first time, my mind was racing with numerous images. Once the obvious image came and went (get your mind out of the gutter, pervs!) more images came to mind. Images like graduation, weddings, promotion, the whole lot. I decided to work backwards and started to think of the importance of clapping with both hands. The actual motion of clapping, if you think about it, has a Lion King-ness to it. You raise your hands to the heavens, grabbing all the good energy of the world you can muster, culminating in the transformation of those feelings into a load clapping sound which is then directly sent to the person intended like a sniper’s bullet. The motion you make is a circle.

Imagine trying to this wonder of natural expression with one hand. It’s really hard. Now the image of a war veteran with one hand or the infamous one-armed man is running through your mind. I figured that the clapping has now transformed from gathering emotion to directing it. This is like the pounding on a door or slapping someone in the face. I see a parallel to this and domestic violence, but that’s for another time.

(Source: http://www.activerespawn.com/)



But then I remembered one of the most beautiful things in the world. I saw two guys sharing a bromance moment by giving each other a high 5. It hit me, both men using only one hand to clap. That’s it! It wasn’t just a simple sound but what that sound represents. Anyone can clap by themselves, but the experience of joining another person in a tandem feeling that is so wonderful, that the two of you need to express it by uniting for a split second.

My two cent’s on the matter: the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of a moment in time where people are connecting in the many celebrations of life. We need to do this more often instead of celebrating alone on our own little island clapping with two hands, hoping someone will hear us. That’s my two cents, keep the change.