CHOICES SHAPE YOUR FUTURE
By Judith Ashton
How much attention do you really give to your incredible five senses? Your sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch?
Sight enables our eyes to detect light and interpret it as images, shapes, colours and distance.
Hearing enables our ears to detect air vibrations, allowing us to perceive different sounds and volumes.
Smell enables our noses to detect airborne chemicals, allowing us to recognise a wide range of odours.
Taste enables our tongues and taste buds to detect chemicals in food and drink, helping us distinguish sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savoury flavours.
Touch allows the skin to sense texture, shape, temperature, pressure and pain.
To experience our world with all five senses is truly a miracle. I try to be as aware as possible of all five and to appreciate each one’s gift every day, and not to take any of them for granted.
Ian Bogost, a columnist for The Atlantic, has just written a book, The Small Stuff, The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Lives. He explains that, to find happiness, we don’t need to totally change our lives, but simply to tune in and become aware of all the small sensations and pleasures around us.
Our lives can be filled with busyness, stress and the pursuit of instant gratification. In this mad rush, we risk losing ourselves, and it’s easy to miss the small, beautiful things and moments that make up our daily routines. We need to find a way to claw back some modicum of sanity. Our world is full of sensory magic if only we take the time to notice it.
We live in an increasingly automated world where we’re trading efficiency for our humanity. What’s not automated these days? Ian Bogost cites self-flushing toilets, automatic taps, no-touch soap dispensers and high-speed hand dryers. Not to mention infuriating robotic phone voices: “press 1 for this, 2 for that and 3 for the other.” Cars self-drive, AI thinks for us, food arrives in packets, Alexa runs our houses and an intimate relationship with a robot is possible!
We all have the power to go inside ourselves, appreciate the miracle of the human body and tune into our incredible five senses. We literally need to “wake up and smell the coffee”.
When did you last make a coffee and really tune into the process? Did you open a pack of coffee and inhale the odour? Did you carefully spoon it into a machine, mug or pot, turn the tap on, hear the running water, pour it into the kettle, watch the boiling bubbles, feel the weight of the kettle and its heat… all the micro-processes until you actually lift the full cup of coffee to your lips, inhale and sip, feeling the heat in your mouth etc.? Did you?
Or did you rush into a shop, swipe your card, grab and go? Running and gulping, headphones on, zooming off to goodness knows where, constantly looking at your phone as you cross the road, narrowly missing bumping into another human being doing exactly the same thing!
Ouch! I don’t like this “modern” world, and we sell ourselves very short if we wholeheartedly embrace this dystopian reality which is marketed as time-saving, efficient and economically a great leap forward.
Do we really have more time? Are we any happier? Are we more connected or more isolated in our little boxes with our headphones on, watching increasing amounts of AI slop? It’s crept up on us with stealth, like a predator stalking its prey. We are the prey and most people don’t realise that we are victims. Many believe they are in control of what they do, see, watch, eat, hear and feel. Far from it. We’ve all passively, unwittingly bought into some billionaire’s vision of the future.
Slow down. Take time to listen to the natural sounds, near and far, all around you.
Whilst preparing a meal, go slowly with awareness, chop, chew and taste the food in your mouth.
Look around… be aware of the beauty, the colours, the shapes and everything in your field of vision.
Be aware of odours and all the subtlety of smells.
Train your fingers to feel the textures they touch. Check out my YouTube TED X talk: “The Power and Importance of Human Touch.”
Let’s stay slowly focused as we remember our five senses. Let’s consciously choose to step away from a collective insanity into our essential humanity.
And I haven’t even mentioned the one that truly makes us human, our precious sixth sense…..
