When I first had the five senses exercise to reduce anxiety, I thought whatever. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but figured it was just another of those gimmicks that eventually loses its mojo. I don't know. It may still be that, but it's taking it a second to wear off.
Meanwhile, while it does, I've found use in the regrounding myself through my senses when I'm feeling overwhelmed. It doesn't work all the time. But that shouldn't reflect too poorly on the exercise. After all, the times it doesn't work, it's typically because I forget to do it.
Yet even when I'm not thinking about it, even when it's the farthest thing from my mind, I do notice it has made me be more attuned to my senses. In the sense that, before, I used to go through the day noticing, but not really experiencing what I was sensing.
It smells funny here.
My eyes sting.
My mouth's dry.
These were... facts. To be treated. Disposed of. Perhaps written down, but warranting no great fuss. Lately, though, I've come to perceive these senses of mine less as a disposable, and more as a warning. Not a bad thing comin' your way kinda warning, but a channel of communication I'd had on mute until now.
I had the privilege of returning to London over the past few days. I've written about my love of this city many times before, including following a visit last spring, here. It's always funny reading back through old posts, isn't it?
The good stuff in life is a whole lot easier to miss than we like to think. We keep thinking life will pull us by the sleeve when there's something worth checking out. Make us look up from our phones, or get out of whatever drama's going on inside our minds at the moment. Except life doesn't. Most days, you won't get a pop-up message telling you you're messing up, or that you're missing something amazing. Usually, it will just move on by.
I like the occasional conversation with past selves that the blockchain provides.
Anyway, there I was sat, just by the Thames, thinking what an amazing organ we've got kicking around in our heads. And perhaps our hearts, to an extent. I can't look at those waters without memories of my first visit, so beautiful, so poignant for a 16-year-old, flooding.
And each time, I find myself taking this visual tube down the past lane, and tapping into that sixteen-year-old self. It's sweet, but I generally try to curb the bittersweet nature of reminisces, and keep it to a minimum. Thankfully, there's no feeling of awe and nostalgia at "how good things were then", rather there's this incredible, almost trippy experience of looking through my eight-years-ago eyes again and seeing through them. It's a journey through time unparalleled, and so far, it's the only place I've felt this. Where I continue to feel this, irrespective of how often or how sparsely I visit.
I was baking muffins earlier, because life demands a calorie intake, apparently. Anyway, my new place has a really old gas oven that I haven't yet changed because money (and because I hate interacting with people xD), which doesn't always run right.
And I'd started the oven, and about ten minutes in, I was thinking "man, that really stinks of gas". The previous tenants wisely put in a gas detector (otherwise I'd probably spend the entire night pacing, checking the oven), so I was fairly secure, but when I checked, I found only half of the tiny little wildfires that were supposed to be baking my muffins had turned on.
The others were just emitting gas. And it took me right back to my first boyfriend. Seventeen year old, this time. And to how he'd leave the oven on to warm up the place, which terrified my blow-up ready-to-pop child-scarred mind. Not to him per se. But again, to standing in the kitchen there, in the morning cold, feeling alive, and for the first time, like my own person.
Quite a ride, making muffins, I tell you.
Anyway, I relit the oven, and the muffins came out looking quite alright.
Doesn't everyone have music that takes them straight back?
There's songs that remind me, like the muffin gas, of being seventeen and feeling like an adventure. There's songs that remind me of being 23 and not realizing how vulnerable I truly was. As I learn to embrace and notice my own senses more, and properly "hear" what they're telling me, I'm sort of using them to retrace a map of my self. Not my life in calendar dates and Polaroids, but the things that marked me. Sensations I couldn't name at the time. Moments of hurt that, too frightened to be called chicken, I foolishly swept under the rug. They also help me deconstruct great moments of joy, and inevitably leave me astounded at their inane simplicity.
This is neither of the two songs mentioned above. It came out two days ago, though, and for the millionth time, I let this wonderfully gifted man's voice carry me.
...are the hardest to relate. Isn't that a given? They're tricky for me to focus on, even as I grow more aware of their importance in my life. Two examples of touch that recently shouted out at me were human warmth and chalk dust. As I move forward, learning how to redefine my own story, I'm reexamining my relationship with others, with the world.
We're so afraid of our hand, shoulder or shin being misunderstood or misread, we avoid touching others like they might carry the plague. And what great healing we deprive ourselves of, in the meantime.
Chalk dust -- I'm experimenting with art. I'm using chalk pastels, in part, to do new things with what I draw. And they feel like magic. Like, I might really touch this and not ruin it kinda magic.
I seem to forget what I was going to say with this post, if anything at all. Maybe not all stories need a moral, you know?
