Life as a sensory experience
I wake in the darkness of the room, the rain falls heavily against the window, a breeze passes across my face. My skin prickles with the cool wind, a welcome relief after the oppressive heat of the night. And for a moment I have forgotten, then like a wave of nausea I remember.
I’ve often wondered whether it is because I am an artist that I experience the world more intensely than others appear to or whether I am mistaken and all people feel intense emotion but they do not express it or are better at ignoring it. Everything to me is intense, the bright sunlight which bounces across the sea, the smell of the meadowsweet, the sound of the rain. I’m sensitive to the way things smell and touch is powerful. I often describe myself as feral, my sensitivity to my environment is acute, more animal than human.
Being overwhelmed by life is something I have become accustomed to but not something I have grown used to. Life for me is a process of navigation, constantly weaving my way through what I am comfortable with and what I am not, every decision monitored. Many times I have withdrawn, sticking to the confines of my little home surrounded by all that is familiar, nothing which threatens or shakes my understanding of the world. This keeps me safe but is it a half life? Does avoiding the outside limit the senses? Preventing the full human experience.
I have often asked myself whether the full human experience is something I want; when I look at the confusion, pain and disorder, blatant disregard for others, and ignorance of those who govern, I’m unsure what it even means to be human. A world in crisis, a climate in flux, nature as the fundamental building block to life being overshadowed by corporate greed. So often we are told that it is the small things which add to the human experience: love, friendship, the smell of woodsmoke; the sunset over the sea… But when you feel everything so acutely there is the constant anxiety that the bigger picture matters, after all what do any of these things mean if the forests are burning? The climate warms and species are lost. Surely the human experience does not just consist of clean cars, consumerism and distraction.
There are moments when life makes sense, most often these are the times when existence feels large and humans insignificant, lying on the damp grass gazing into a billion stars, suddenly its easy to feel small and imagine that we are just specks floating on a rock in something beyond our comprehension. How are we so ignorant and ego driven that we believe everything needs to be controlled. How does it make sense to disregard a biological system which is so in tune that humans are a mere parasite? How do we take everything so seriously and become so infected with human the preoccupation of self?
But human is what we are and as such we are complex, and in modern times when everything and anything is possible, we are lost inside our own minds, the world is loud, it has textures and colours, staggering beauty, and unfathomable emotions, it also has constraints, confusion, expectation. Its not easy to be simply human when our environments are at times based on illusion, where we are distracted from what is real, misdirection is normal and unnoticed by many, we must fight through the unreal and search for what simply exists outside of the societal constructs. We owe it to ourselves to constantly search for what it means to be truly human, having a natural human experience, acknowledging our true senses and taking responsibility for what we receive and the footprint we leave behind.