To help, to benefit, to contribute. In one way or another, the question of service comes up for every human being. Every one of us becomes familiar with a variety of responses on the path of service, ranging from sacrifice to full blown refusal…to a dragging sense of obligation…to accommodation or duty…to obsequiousness…to a peaceful feeling of fulfillment…to pure joy. Consciously or not, the issue of service is at the core of much of what we do.

As evidenced by fingerprints, some of us are more concentrated than others on the path of service. The fingerprint pattern that identifies a particular involvement on this path is the whorl, which looks like a series of concentric circles in the core of the fingerprint. As you might guess, the more whorls, the greater is the emphasis in the person's life on service. The presence of four or more whorls in a set of hands indicates a life-long quest for balance between service and sacrifice. Trial and error is likely to reveal that offering oneself as a doormat doesn't benefit anyone; neither does the gesture with the hidden motives. Service is an attitude, not an activity; the key seems to be the necessity for equal shares of benefit to he recipient, to the self, and to the planet.

In the case of someone whose fingerprints are all whorls, a specific story emerges which can be of interest to all of us. This is the person whose attraction to the path of service is so keen that unusual measures must be taken to satisfy - to use up - all appetites. Unresolved cravings could otherwise arise as interferences to completely committed service.

Think how difficult this could be in our society! Think of the pious parent, imbued with notions of charity and self-sacrifice, faced with a child whose need is first and foremost to be self-indulgent! Think of marrying the grown-up child whose appetites had been thwarted by parents, teachers, Scouts, and the criminal justice system! Think of BEING the child.

We all have appetites and, regardless of how they are seen by others, it is part of our responsibility to feed them appropriately. No, not our excesses: those are consequences of hungers that have gone unattended. It is up to each of us to work back toward our basic drives, to satisfy them according to our own innate standards. Hand analysis is one of the tools for self-discovery: the hands themselves offer more objective opinions than society about what works for each of us.

A colleague was invited a few months ago to analyze the hands of autistic children in a small Special Education classroom. Prints of each child's hands were taken. Judging by the information in the hands, each child had a very different story from the next. But there was one thing they tended to have in common, and that was an unusually large percentage of whorls among their fingerprints. Even though this wasn't a reasonable sampling, it struck me that autism may function for these kids as a forcible screening out of external influences, affording them a special opportunity to concentrate on satiating their own appetites.

Could an autistic lifetime contribute to one of deep commitment to service? I don't know. But the speculation moved me toward a better care and feeding of the animal inside me.