![]() ![]() All over the world, children play tag without having to learn how. ![]() A new-born baby will instinctively turn its head towards a touch on the cheek. The hand of a two-month-old human foetus will grasp when it feels something in its palm. It offers proof of the solidity of things other than ourselves. It is the basic animal instinct that lets us know we are alive in the world. But one could just as easily say that touch is the highest sense and for the same reasons. He looked down on it because it was found in all animals and it relied on mere proximity, not the higher human faculties of thought, memory and imagination. And “hunger” feels like the right word for it, in the sense that your body lets your mind know that something is up, and fills it with a gnawing sense of absence.Īristotle considered touch the lowliest sense. I even miss those clumsy, mistimed hugs where you bang bones together and it goes on just slightly too long or not long enough. Now I find that I really miss hugging people. It must have been like trying to cuddle a scarecrow. The best I could manage at first was a sort of bear-claw hold with my arms hanging limply down my huggee’s back. Then, just as I had completed my long internship in handshaking, it began to lose currency and I had to hastily reskill in hugging. I used to botch them all the time, offering the wrong hand (being left-handed didn’t help) or grabbing the other person’s fingers instead of their palm. But it is also artful, because it has to be silently synchronised with someone else, unlike a handshake which can be offered and accepted asynchronously.įor the truly socially inept, even a handshake can be fiddly. It is natural because bodily contact is the first, endorphin-releasing language we learn as babies and share with other apes. A hug feels to me like an odd mix of the natural and the artful. I have looked on nervously as, over the past two decades, hugging has moved from being a marginal pursuit to a constant of British social life. I am a socially awkward, non-tactile person. Skin hunger is not a phrase I had come across before last year, nor a problem I ever imagined facing. Psychologists have a term for the feelings of deprivation and abandonment we experience: “skin hunger”. Touch is the sense we take most for granted, but we miss it when it’s gone. Did you shake hands with a new colleague at work? Did your coat brush against another commuter’s on the train? Did someone bump your elbow and mutter an apology when rushing past you on an escalator? If you’d known that was the last time you’d make contact with the body of a stranger, you’d have paid more attention.Īnd what about the 8.2 million British adults who live on their own? Many will have gone nearly a year now without so much as a pat on the arm from another person. W hen was the last time you touched someone you don’t live with? One day last March, probably you’re not sure of the date. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |