Recently, I completed a three-hour, computerized safe driver’s course for insurance purposes. While we might bemoan such requirements, a review of traffic safety rules benefits us all. However, the opening data about the importance of being aware of our senses when we drive caught my attention.
Of course, we use our eyes when we drive. We also depend on our peripheral vision to avoid possible accidents. We not only listen for external noise like sirens, but also for unusual sounds within our car engine. We use our sense of touch as we hold the steering wheel with both hands. And we use our sense of smell to detect possible engine problems.
However, we should never use our sense of taste when we are driving. Eating in the vehicle when we are behind the wheel is a no-no. While eating might not register as dangerous as texting or talking on the phone while driving, it still can be a major distraction to the driver.
As I listened to this information, I was reminded of my teaching days. My freshmen English students spent the first six weeks of class focusing on the use of their senses to enhance their writing. We looked at a variety of objects and pieces of literature and we wrote. We listened to the classroom and to each other and we wrote. We smelled potpourri and we wrote. We tasted red hots and remembered the smell of popping corn and the taste of it and we wrote.
We touched articles in the room and we wrote. We also empathized with some of the characters in our reading - another kind of “touching” sense. And we looked for the ways authors use senses to draw the readers into the stories.
Shortly after I completed the driving review, I read a piece by Dan Souza, Editor-in-Chief of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. For years, he and a colleague have guest lectured at a Stanford University undergraduate science course. Their presentation started out as a basic lesson on the chemistry of the five tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami - meaty). But, their lesson evolved into how all the senses, not just smell and taste, play into the pleasure of eating.
Souza writes, “We eat with our eyes…Pay close attention to your senses as you eat. There are tastes, aromas, sounds, and sensations influencing every bite.”
Makes one hungry, doesn’t it?
During Lent, Anne Cumings, author of My Body is Good, wrote an Upper Room devotional. She said, “When I found myself at the altar on that Ash Wednesday and felt the warm thumb of my pastor on my forehead, something shifted. I became aware that there is no way for me to be a Christian without my body. It was my body that moved through that sanctuary, my body that sang the longing, penitential hymns, and my body that watched as candles flickered on the altar table. It was my body that smelled the oily ashes spread on my forehead as a tangible, sensory reminder of my humanity.”
Aristotle was the first to name the five senses. In modern times, other senses have been named - sense of balance, sense of space, sense of place, sense of self, sense of humor. Some scientists are exploring even more ways we may actually sense our world.
And we’ve long known that with the loss of one sense, the other senses can become sharper. The blind can hear sounds the rest of us are unaware of. They read through their sense of touch. Likewise, the deaf learn to read lips and sign language.
Unless one of our senses is impaired, we rarely acknowledge their existence. Yet we use all of them every day. At a large gathering, we may move about trying to find a better view. We may even say, “I want to see.”
Of course, if we’re gifted a cake, we most definitely want to taste it now. We don’t want to wait.
And some of us actually resist empathetic feelings. If we care about others, we must try to ease their pain. Apathy is less demanding.
But to experience life to its fullest, let us join Maya Angelou who said, “I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.”
2023