The Thinking Hands

During lockdown many of us took a step sideways. Some of us went off the rails entirely…unsure of where the track had ever been in the first place.

Mitko, 2025

Object created out of discarded work uniforms. Oloop Workshop November 26th 2025

The world stood still; the machines went quiet. The conveyor belts slowed, the lights dimmed, and the constant hum that we had mistaken for life went silent. For the first time in a long while, we had the space to think, to feel, to observe the reality we’ve been sprinting through without looking.

Am I happy?
What do I want?
What is it that I really need?

To some, the world revealed itself as a kind of landfill—piled high with the consumed, the emptied, the discarded. Lives and precious resources drained in service of profit dressed up as progress. And once you see, you can’t unsee: the mountain of things; the quiet ache of waste.

The wheels spin, the belts glide, the lights blaze once more. But inwardly something is different. We assess. We discern. We evaluate the true measure of happiness.

What if… I didn’t throw it away?
What if there is still life in it—still purpose, still beauty?
What if I listen with my eyes, and let my hands do the thinking?

What if value is not in the new, but in the rediscovered?
What if care is a form of resistance?
What if the act of mending—of choosing to restore rather than replace—is its own quiet revolution?

Perhaps the world doesn’t need more things.
Perhaps it needs more people willing to notice, to pause, to reimagine the worth of what already exists.