When we’re feeling caught up in life’s ebbs and flows, nothing feels more remedial than a hug, or reassuring squeeze of the hand, or a stroke on the back, nothing more heartening than the smell of the wind over the grass, nothing more consoling than the sound of someone singing, or playing music. That is why my thoughts these days are particularly with those who, for whatever reason cannot leave the front door. It is also why I say that more than ever, there is a need to be in touch not just with other people but with our senses too.

Our senses are our gateway between the external world and our inner selves. The more we open the gates, the more of the world we let in, the more stimulated we are, and the more meaning life seems to have. Being stuck indoors day after day, it may feel hard to find the motivation, focus or even means by which to engage our senses. But just like our muscles, memory, or any skill, if we don’t exercise them, they atrophy. So, I would like to share with you an exercise I did every day for over a year, which was to journal “an aroma a day”. These would not have to be beautiful smells – most of them came from the mundane or even the repugnant. The point was that I had to notice their existence and then try to describe them. This would inevitably lead to thoughts, emotions, images and stories. Here, for example, is the entry for this day last year:

A cinnamon scented day. Base and spicy. Warm. Reminiscent of steamy kitchens with glowing ovens and bubbling pans. Or a roadside chai stall at dawn, fruit and bark caramelising under tropical sun.

That second bit was not my memory. I have never been to India. But that is the power of scent. Sitting somewhere between the emotional and the physical, the abstract and tangible, it can transport us to places we’ve never been or can’t remember being. It only asks to be taken notice of.

In the words of Marcel Proust: “When from a long-distant past nothing subsists… taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised for a long time… and bear in the almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

I will add, “and the infinite landscapes of the imagination, too.”