TOUCH, YOUR FIRST LANGUAGE

A recent post on Facebook during lockdown – the time of restrictions and home confinement – caught my attention:

“Pray for the huggers… we are not okay.
Do you know how hard it is
not to hug when you’re a
hugger at heart?
The struggle is real.”

I am a hugger.

You may not be one for hugs and kisses, but most of us need human contact. Canadian Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood says it so well:‘Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth’.

Helen Keller, the famous deaf and blind writer, wrote that ‘paradise is attained by touch’. How wonderful, to be able to reach a place that words can’t penetrate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led us into a dystopian era, one in which we are all fumbling around like extraterrestrials in a world where people make contact through technology. Hugs are given