I remember reading in Kurt Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a kid about this mythical person the narrator knew, who made a point of sanding down his fingertips so he would ever so much more skilled as a lover, and be able to pick up the subtle electricity of his partner. I highly doubt someone ever did that, but still, as a metaphor it's got its place. Maybe set to the tune of the Pointer Sisters singing, "I Want a Lover with a Slow Hand..." (and sanded fingertips, besides :-).
Anyway, it probably won't surprise you to learn that the ever-balanced Tao has something to say about the power of touch, too. Interesting how it combines it with hope. Thinking about how babies who are never picked up experience "failure to thrive." As babies in adult bodies, perhaps we are all more alike than different there, after all.
Touch.
“To touch, to feel, to rub, to caress. Our lives cannot be sensed whole. We have to feel our way forward. And what we feel, we have to trust.”
One of the hardest things to do is to trust our own feelings. Beginning with well-meaning parents and teachers, we hear so many instructions that thwart and ridicule our perceptions that we eventually internalize this mistrust of our own feelings. Far too many of us have voices of doubt continuously playing in our minds. Soon, it is hard to feel anything genuine, because these voices are always telling us that we are wrong.
Disappointments and setbacks reinforce these voices. Maybe we start out trying to be extraordinary. “I’ll be great,” we vow, but then we stumble a little, and then voices become louder.
But we have to stick to our perceptions and to our feelings. That is where experience, philosophy and self-refinement come in: we know that we have accomplished things, we know that we can coordinate what we perceive with established principles, and we trust that our beings are finely tuned enough to accurately feel what is around us.
What we do in life is up to us and will not be known all at once. Therefore, we have to feel our way along, little by little, building the vision to know what we are individually meant to do. We can’t let doubt interfere with our touch. We have to trust our touch.
Editor's note: If you need some vintage Pointer Sisters to go with this, here's the link to their video of this on YouTube.