How many door and drawer handles or knobs would you guess you touch in the average day?

Well, the internet is a wide and wonderful world unto itself, and one research oriented soul decided to actually find out! This seemingly simple, but actually very deep (and fun!) research project had only the criteria that every door or drawer handle or knob that the person used in a day, had to be photographed and recorded. Aside from the obvious quandaries of whether to count both sides of a door handle, and whether to count both getting in and out of a car, if you can not get caught up in the mathematics and science of it, he did note that it really helped him to focus on the here and now – what he was actually doing, and not what he was planning or about to do (in the context of the door handles, at least). Interestingly, this is one of the main aims of Buddhists – to focus on what one is actually doing right at every single moment. And I’m guessing that this sort of project wouldn’t be out of our scope either, as we get to photograph all of the gorgeous knobs that we have been filling our homes with!

You could try this sort of thing yourself, at home, as I did, only without the photographic record. Compare all of the different sorts of handles, how they feel and turn, how they operate (up/down or rotating), and how they look. When I tried it, I resolved to both clean and replace quite a few of my door knobs! Maybe when I try it on my floors tomorrow, they will also get a bit of the attention they have been lacking in…!

Photo credits: Reach by Fernando de Sousa

          

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