Touch and Love
Skin, a vital organ that covers your entire body. It senses temperature, motion, pressure, friction, vibration, stretching, texture and more. It protects you from extremes of heat, cold, pressure and friction. But much more: it allows you to feel another’s touch on your skin and allows you to feel your touch on another’s skin. This is touch’s language of emotion.
How sensitive is a lover’s tender exploration of your face, your brow, your eyes, your lips. How good is it to have a loved one explore your body with tender but firm hands and excite the emotions that follow. How exciting is that first touch, hand to hand, skin to skin, between two who are attracted to each other. To me it is electric – a thrill that seldom comes but must be recognized.
How electric is it? What is the process that causes our senses, not just touch, to come alive? Is it even worth asking or should we just enjoy that feeling, that innervation? Sometimes simple closeness, proximity, initiates the same feelings. We’ve all felt it. You draw close to an attractive woman, maybe to whisper in her ear, maybe to help with her jacket. The closer you get the more something moves or flows in your body. Your mind and emotions are drawn to the moment. Something is going on. You haven’t yet touched this attractive other but you want to. This is action at a distance. This is a violation of what physicists call “locality”. What is the medium that transfers this emotion laden signal from her to you and hopefully from you to her? You haven’t yet touched but a powerful and demanding signal has crossed the gap.
We know that your brain, simple thinking, generates electromagnetic waves. We know that these very weak waves spread out from your head and diminish as the distance from your head increases – and amplify as the distance from the source decreases. These waves carry information. They carry the content of the thoughts that created the wave. Could it be that perceptive people can receive and interpret these waves? Or could it be that the waves exchanged between two people with an exceptional attraction are so strong that they are immediately recognized?
What about love at first sight? It happens. Two strangers meet and the attraction is immediate. What flows between these two?
Has God, has nature, has evolution devised a signal that will draw these two together and hopefully lead to the propagation of the race? I believe in the strange and beautiful desires and paths of romance. Poets write of it. Voices sing praises of it. Painters picture it. Some people meet and draw closer over time. Love blossoms. Closeness and touch play a vital role in drawing them together. Here romance is also worthy of the poet, the song, and the artist. Again, what is this strange and beautiful dance of closeness and touch?
I am a technical person. I try to quantify and explain this universal attractive presence of closeness and touch. Universal is the wrong word. People do meet, but for some friendship is the only result. Opportunistic sex may happen, but it is transitory and often ends with regrets. That mutual and indefinable flow of feelings, bonds, respect, and love prompted by closeness and touch doesn’t always happen. Why not? A mystery with no solution. Pity those who are only on one side of this flow.