Reaction

I was standing in my kitchen making a salad. I had just finished cutting up a tomato for the salad. I use the sharpest knife in my knife block for cutting tomatoes and other soft veggies and fruits. The knife is like a long thin razor. I finished cutting the tomato and turned to the kitchen sink to rinse off the knife. Then I turned to grab a towel to dry it, and the knife fell out of my grasp. My first instinct was a little voice in my head that said, "You're fast—grab it out of the air!" But at almost the same time, before I could move, there was a second voice in my head.

To explain this, I have to go back a way to my last job. Dave, a co-worker, had an unusual habit. If he lost his grip on something—if he accidentally dropped something—he didn't attempt to grab it. Just the opposite—he snatched his hands away as if he had touched a hot stove. One day I asked him about that reaction, and he told me a story.

At one of his previous workplaces, some men were handling a very heavy object. I don't recall what it was or exactly how much it weighed, but it weighed plenty. The men were maneuvering this object from one location to another when something happened—a chain broke, perhaps—and the heavy object fell toward the floor. One of the men instinctively tried to catch it by placing his hands under it. The result was that this massive object fell onto his hands and crushed them. In fact, it more than crushed them; Dave said it flattened the man's hands to the size of dinner plates. The man lost both hands. From that day onward, Dave undertook to train himself to instinctively snatch his hands away from any object he dropped.

Although I didn't do physical practice, I did think about that industrial accident a number of times. Maybe that's why, when I lost my grasp on the knife and an instinct told me to grab it, another voice in my head insisted, "Let it go!" I pulled my hands away from the knife and it fell harmlessly to the floor. I picked it up, rinsed it off, dried it, and placed it back into the knife block. 

This is a reaction that everyone should think about. If you drop an inanimate object, yank your hands back. Don't let your hands automatically grab for it. You won't have time to think about it when it happens. So think about it ahead of time, so that a seed is planted in your brain: "Let it go!"