Touch is Fundamental to Our Well-Being

Touch is fundamental to our well being.

But then I have known those who shun being touched, viewing it as infringement. Not touched much when children, they reject it as adults.

I like what I see at airports—loved ones saying hello or goodbye, affection sealed by an embrace, often accompanied with a kiss.

Research says that massaged babies thrive, put on weight faster, do well in school, and are successful as adults at work.

We have five senses, all important, but touch tells us we are loved.

The handshake may be our greeting ritual, but proves perfunctory compared to being hugged or kissed.

Our latent memories of touch begin with those first days on our mother’s breast and later, as children, tucked into bed, granted safe slumber with a forehead kiss.

There are children, too many, who have no memory of such bliss and, like a shadow, it follows them down life’s corridors. They grow up angry, lonely, wary.

“Touch is far more essential than our other senses,” says psychologist Saul Schanberg.

I like essayist Diane Ackerman’s take on touch—“Among other things, touch teaches us the difference between I and other” (A History of the Senses).

I like when poetry transcends prose:

“I’ve heard the phenomenon is called skin starvation
and it’s the reason infants are laid naked
on their mother’s breast the moment after birth.
Because touch is how we greet one
another in almost every language and say:
you are here
and I am with you and we are not alone” (Joy Sullivan, Instructions for Traveling West).