I’d been trying to figure out what was missing from my life, and that unforgettable walk home from the eye doctor revealed the answer: I needed to connect with my five senses. I’d been treating my body like the car my brain was driving around town, but my body wasn’t some vehicle of my soul, to be overlooked when it wasn’t breaking down. My body — through my senses — was my essential connection to the world and to other people.
I agreed to join Kennedy in the 75 Hard challenge, and among other “critical tasks”, I am committed to reading ten pages of a self-help book every day for seventy-five days — so although I had not read Gretchen Rubin before, Life in Five Senses was the first book I selected for the challenge; and I’m glad I did. As humans we are wired to filter out the stimuli that we're accustomed to, so it’s normal to waft through our lives without really sensing those things that we encounter every day. After a trip to the eye doctor left Rubin concerned about her long term sight, she resolved to really see her surroundings from then on; and being the kind of person who enjoys self-appointed tasks and challenges and recording her findings, Rubin decided to spend a year deeply exploring each of her senses and taking notes. Life in Five Senses is divided into what we commonly think of as our core senses (Rubin notes that others might include our sense of equilibrium or feeling one’s heart racing, but she’s focussed on the “Big Five” of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), and along with scientific information that Rubin includes from her research, the author shares many stories of her own experiences through the course of the year, often based on training or exploring her senses. This type of intentionality is exactly what the 75 Hard challenge is meant to promote and I did find myself inspired by Rubin’s project; the blend of informal storytelling and scientific research hit the sweet spot of interest for me, and again, I am really glad that I started my own project here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It was strange to realize that I make the world. In darkness and silence, my brain receives countless messages as my five senses probe my surroundings. In that outer world, there’s no color, no music, no scent until those messages return to my brain — and then the world bursts into life inside my body.
One of the tasks that Rubin set before herself was to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day for the year; to both find ways to focus on particular sensory experiences and to discover the surprising within the familiar. Acknowledging that the access, time, and freedom that she has for this project makes her “very fortunate”, Rubin jokes: When I told my college roommate about my experiment, she said dryly, “Note to self: move within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum.” (At the end of the book, Rubin stresses: “I’d chosen a museum, but, of course, someone else might choose a different place. A park, a route through a neighborhood, front stoop — the place doesn’t really matter. With familiarity and repetition, the world reveals itself in an unexpected way.”) So, although living in NYC meant that Rubin could easily take courses on perfumery at the Pratt Institute, attend a Dinner in the Dark restaurant, or handily book a sensory deprivation tank — and these kind of heightened experiences do make for good reading — a walk with the dog through my own neighbourhood over the course of a year, while really being attuned to my senses, does sound like the most meaningful way to live; why waft through life? I was interested in Rubin’s project and appreciated the conclusions she drew and the stories of how she implemented her findings into her domestic life.
As for the researched bits, I was intrigued by the following (about the brain’s focus on finding and studying faces):
According to Roman statesman and writer Cicero, King Xerxes the Great “offered a prize for the man who could invent a new pleasure.” Inventing a new pleasure seems like an impossible task, yet this explains the extraordinary attraction of YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and, of course, Facebook. They give us entirely fresh ways to gratify our desire to look at faces. We can view more faces in a single scroll through social media than during a lifetime in a medieval village.
And I found the following surprising but not surprising:
Because our expectations shape our experience, we respond differently to the same scent if we’re in a context that tells us “Parmesan cheese” vs. “vomit,” or “pine tree” vs. “disinfectant cleaner.” Does gasoline smell good or bad? People disagree. What’s the smell of “fresh” — is it pine, flowers, the ocean? Claims that “citrus is cheering” and “ peppermint is energizing” are based purely on learned associations. Americans find the smell of lavender “relaxing ,” but people from Brazil consider it “invigorating.”
And I found several things very surprising (but not incredible enough to fact-check), as when Rubin writes, Though it seems possible that humans, like other animals, communicate with pheromones, researchers haven’t yet been able to identify a single one or when she notes in an aside Despite the old trick question, the tomato can qualify both as a fruit and a vegetable, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture categorizes it as a vegetable. So, surprising or not, I did appreciate the research that Rubin includes throughout.
Even though I was celebrating my senses as never before, I kept dreaming up new ways to explore them. I knew that by going through my body, I could reach my spirit, and through my spirit, I could reach my body.
And reaching the spirit through the body and the body through the spirit seems to be the point of living more intentionally. The 75 Hard challenge requires that I exercise twice a day, one of those times outside, and while walking my dog in the recent below freezing weather, I have to admit that concentrating on my senses — noting the odd bird call and the squeaking of my boots on the snow, looking for the pops of colour against the hazy white sky, really noticing a smell, even if it’s unpleasant diesel from a passing truck in the otherwise empty scent field — living in the moment and experiencing each one to the fullest, this trumps wafting through the day (or worse: trudging through the slush with my head down just so I can put a check mark on the chart; that’s a terrible metaphor for life.)
Rubin ends Life in Five Senses with many recommendations for ways that a person can enhance their own sensory experience, and whether that might involve adding in pleasant stimuli (artwork or candles or savoury treats) or removing annoying ones (really looking for clutter in the spaces we see every day, turning down [or off!] the jabbering television), there’s plenty here that anyone could implement to create a happier, more meaningful life. This was certainly the right book for me in the moment (even if the biggest challenge was limiting myself to reading just a bit of it every day).
