The Most Important Sense
Holly B. asks: You can only retain one of your five senses: which one and why?
Let’s start off with listing the five senses. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch.
Let’s also set some guidelines: You still have full use of your body (not bedridden or wheelchair bound).
No brainer: Touch. Touch is the most direct connection we have with the world, the most comforting, the most powerful.
We tend to overlook the importance of touch. Our senses of sight and hearing allow us to take in far too much information to consciously process. This overconsumption leaves the majority of us with cluttered brains and a non-stop majority output of nonsense in an attempt to disgorge the excess.
We forget touch as important when we eat because taste and smell are so powerful, but touch lies there as the bedrock framework for understanding where to place those taste and smell inputs.
Before we could hear, or see, or taste, or smell, we could touch. It is our first sense of the world, and mastery of touch is essential to the mastery of any physical discipline.
Through touch we can still “hear” vibrations and “see” a shape. Through touch we maintain the most agency over ourselves, more than any other sense.
If all I had was touch, I could still read books, walk, run, swim, play piano, hug my sweetie, snuggle with my dogs. Without touch, all of those lose the essence of their enjoyment, they become merely mechanical actions.
It’s funny how we humans use the word “feeling” to indicate both a physical and emotional connection to the world; that duality doesn’t exist as strongly with any other sense.
Through touch we transmit emotion most effectively, and ultimately emotion is the driver of our actions and indicator of our satisfactions.
While I wouldn’t like to lose any of my senses, if it came down to the wire, I’d hold on the tightest to touch.
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