Senses

I know I’ve been rabbiting on about observation a bit lately. I guess that’s partly because I went through a stage earlier this year of not feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling or tasting much at all. By which I mean that those messages were not really getting through to my brain from their various receptors. The messengers were milling about, vaguely nervous, outside my door. I was in a weird fog that I’m only really ready to talk about now because coming out of it was a quietly but very distinctly painful process to go through.

Happily, one of the side effects of suddenly feeling when I hadn’t for some months was that I felt everything very intensely: the positive as well as the negative. All of my senses were hyper-alert. And since that time I feel like I have been rediscovering all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures in the world around me, as though I were a small child again.

I know I’ve written here before about how I envy children and their ability to interact with the world (I have a habit of repeating myself it seems…), but I am endlessly in awe of the way children view their environment. And so to feel like I am achieving an information-gathering process that is even remotely similar to that of a child makes me feel happy. I feel like I am stepping out into the world for the first time.

Some things my senses have liked recently:

• the sound of sand scattered over still water

• the smell of the early, chilly morning

• the taste of my Mum’s pumpkin soup recipe, lovingly prepared by yours truly

• the taste of spinach and fetta gosleme with lemon juice, bought at Leichardt markets on a Saturday morning

• the feel of pasta dough as it starts to become a stretchy, malleable ball in my flour-covered hands

• the sight of my new-found friend, Astro cat, bounding around my house with a mad energy

• the feel of the soft, frail skin under another person’s arms and under their eyes

• the feel of hot water running down my face and through my hair as I put my head under the shower head first thing in the morning

• the smell of real, fresh chai

There are, of course, plenty more but these are what I can think of off the top of my head. I just hope I can keep this awareness of my senses in tact!