Researchers found that gently stroking a baby seems to reduce activity in the infant brain associated with painful experiences. Their results suggest that lightly brushing an infant at a certain speed – of approximately 3 centimeters per second – could provide effective pain relief before clinically necessary medical procedures. (1)

Touch. The most cryptic of all senses.

A gentle touch can sooth pain. A loving touch can make the cosmos a tolerable place again. We seek touch. And we miss it when it is not there. When all other things are gone. touch is the only way we have to access what “is there” beside us.

We can imagine of any other sense missing, but not the sense of touch. A sense so fundamental not because it is a way to sense the cosmos, but because it is the only way for the cosmos to Be. In a cosmos where everything is interconnected, the sense of touch is equivalent to the notion of existence itself. 

You are not just touching that table.

You are allowing the table to touch you back.

Feel the cosmos around you. Touching everything. Which in turn touches everything else in return. At the end, that familiar sense of touch ends up back to the only thing existing, the only thing you can actually touch.

You…