In this episode, we explore some of the consequences that arise from literally losing our senses…
Yes, I do have to face that fact: I’m gettin’ old. Okay, as yet not quite to that level of “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” from Shakespeare’s classic ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech, but yeah, a lot closer to it than I’d like. And these days, quite suddenly, I’m feeling a lot more sense-less than before.
Which senses? Hearing’s still fine - or, at the least, I’ll wake up on an instant if a mosquito whines past my ears in the middle of the night. I feel the cold all right - particularly the surprisingly-cold just-before-dawn mornings on these supposedly warm days. Eyesight’s struggling a bit these days - I’ve had to crank the glasses up a notch in the past few months - but that’s not so much from ageing as from a bad habit of staring at a laptop screen for way too many hours on end without looking up at anything else. Touch is still… okay, I’d guess?… though thumb, index and middle finger on both hands have been getting steadily somewhat-more-numb over the years from nerve-compression from a slowly-growing bone-spur inside a vertebra in my neck.
So far, so not-so-good, even if most just the normal un-joys of ageing. But it’s gotten a whole lot worse in the last week, after my first-ever bout with COVID stripped me of the rest of the classic ‘five senses’. I still have some sense of taste left, though not much. But scent and sense of smell is gone.
Just gone. Nothing left at all.
So no more wafting fumes of Christmas brandy. (Okay, I don’t drink these days - in fact can’t - but it still smelt good in the glass!) No more “wake up and smell the coffee”. No more wandering out into the garden for the subtle scent of the roses.
Sure, I can see them, admire them; hear the quiet buzz of the bees moving between them. But I can’t smell those roses at at all.
And that loss may well be forever now, for me.
Oh well.
Becoming more sense-less is not just about losing the pleasures of life - there are some real safety-issues too. Having lost my sense of smell, I now have no way to tell if that egg is okay before it goes into the frying-pan; if I walk away from the stove for a moment, I can’t tell if the food is starting to burn. More worrying is that I won’t be able to detect that first subtle hint of woodsmoke that’s often the only warning we get about a bushfire that’s on its way. That’s scary.
And there’s nothing that I can do about it right now, to make the sensing better. That’s scary too…
Sure, the senses support each other, and can substitute for each other to some extent: use sound and touch when it’s too dark to see, and so on. But that doesn’t work when all senses are dulled or unavailable: a classic ecosystem-collapse, in that sense.
The other thing that’s struggling is sensemaking. Sense, make-sense, decide, act; that’s the classic sensemaking / decision-making loop. But it’s hard to make sense in that sense when there’s no sense to work with - when the senses themselves are sense-less. That part gets tricky, in the physical-world at least.
Yet even the not-so-physical sensemaking is struggling somewhat at the moment, too: it’s limited because the mind itself is no longer so sharp, from the strain on the system imposed by COVID. That’ll wear off in time, I’m told - but the loss of senses maybe won’t. That’s hard.
Yet it’s not just me, and not just COVID, either: as an entire society we’re in real danger of senselessly driving ourselves sense-less, in almost every sense of the word. Sure, the senses, sensors and means of sensemaking are all there, perhaps even better than ever before: but the signal we need is drowned out by a a relentless, swirling sensory-overload, constant cacophony of drivel, distraction, digital-diarrhoea and more. Benumbed by noise. Too often, even the senses themselves are no longer used, everything instead locked into closed-loop echo-chambers, ‘policy-based evidence’, self-entrapped in Gooch’s Paradox of ‘things not only have to be seen to be believed, but also have be believed to be seen’.
To break out of that trap, we have to un-believe in our own sense of certainty, and learn to see and sense the world anew, again, with whatever senses we might still be able to muster. That’s the challenge for me right now, at least, as I claw my way out from COVID and from the general confusion and contusions of the wider world.
You are in my thoughts friend - I'm deeply grateful that covid didn't do its worst and that you are safe, and I'm very sorry to hear about your loss of sense and the mental fogginess. I hope these things clear up well - and soon.
Thank you for this article - eloquently written, a call to bring our attention to our need for common sense. I appreciate how your writing reminds us to consider the experiences of change and question the assumptions we so easily make.
Rest up my friend - we'll catch up soon 🙏