Touch 2

Last week we were at the beach and, while talking, babbling some stream of consciousness, I picked up a pebble. It's shape formed to my hand, its smooth texture comforted my skin. I heald on to it, not really focused on it, returning it to my attention periodically, but mostly just rolling it in my palm. Some distraction came up, a dog running close by or the tide lapping up, and I dropped it. After gathering my stuff and resettling I became aware it was lost. A sensation of emptiness, grief even, came over me. As all feelings do it washed over all of me.
I'll be coming back to this. It has brought a focus to my swirling thoughts on the matter. Emotions, feelings happen in the body. Walking home through dark city streets, you feel them first, look over your shoulder, a gang of men are following you. Your heart beats faster, you sweat, your central nervous system is on alert, viscera change focus, digestion stops. These physical processes are the emotion fear. Secondary to this is the conscious awareness of fear. Some feelings are not registered consciously.
Cognition has been the focus of most theories of mind. Emotions traditionaly have been considered too slippery for consideration in serious theories of being. But there is no reason without feeling. Antonio Damasios' somatic marker hypothesis suggests each new experience, each object, each person we encounter triggers a response in the body. We get a feeling about them. Some people mean nothing and spark no somatic marker in us. Others bring us to states of rapture. Reasoning is slow. We need to have feelings about things in order to know how to react to them. If bitten by a dog when young a somatic reminder will be set. Each time you see a similar dog, even merely thinking of that dog, that same feeling, that warning, gut feeling will kick in. Our language reveals how we 'think' through our bodies. How we grasp facts, have gut feelings etc.
We are losing touch with ourselves. This last year my thoughts have been inspired by neuroscience. This focus on the brain can confuse us. How we feel about things in our bodies forms communication loops with our brains. Mind body dualism sneaked  in to my reasoning despite my conscious rejection of Descartes myth, the homunculus, the ghost in the machine. Being is a whole. How we feel about things comes first. Secondarily we rationalise.
Sight and sound are catered for in culture through music and the visual arts. There is no comparable system in place for touch. But through our seldom being hungry, through central heating, through rarely being outdoors, we are losing touch. In recorded music, digital bass free sound, music without feeling has taken hold and pushed music to a different place in our lives. Only when music is live or loud does it make sense anymore. Children growing in to teenagers today listen to a trebly tinkle through a phone speaker. My generation religiously kept a soundtrack to our lives. Instead of fathers fixing their cars with their sons, feeling how the machinery works, they are out of touch, sending it to the garage where there knowledge is lost and superstition grows. Food, once grown by families who felt the soil through their hands and felt its weight through the spade now walk a trolley through the centrally heated supermarket. The division of labour finds small pockets of craft skill but mostly the population engage in unfeeling work on computers. They are losing touch.
Emotional understanding resides in the body. It lives in touch. In movement. Making things. Growing things. Playing instruments. Dancing. Climbing, fighting, boxing, turning, carving, fucking, dancing, running, diving, these are where we are at our best. The over emphasis on knowing that, collecting facts, has displaced knowing how.
Since we developed consciousness man has looked for meaning. But we are only animals. Other animals can not figure out a meaning to life. And if they can find no meaning then why would we have the mind skills to find meaning. All animals, including humans,  have evolved to survive, not to figure themselves and the meanings of life out. Due to having no need to search for meaning! other animals are content in a way we are not. The path to this contentment is through know how. Through doing. Through touch. When cycling downhill at high speed there is no time to consider meaning. All our consciousness is focused on the job in hand. This is when we are at our most content.