The Power of Touch

 We live in a world that tries very hard to keep everything at a distance. Swipe the card. Tap the screen. Watch from afar. Hands clean. Risk avoided. Yet our skin remembers a different world. One where knowing required contact.

I have spent years handling machines. Grip a spanner. Feel metal warm under your palm after the engine has run hot. Check the tension in a cable. Trace the edges of a panel to find where alignment went wrong. You cannot truly understand a machine until you have felt its heartbeat through the tools that keep it alive. That is one kind of touch. The kind that transfers knowledge.

But the touch that cuts deeper is something older.

If you ask me what texture wakes the ancient chambers of memory inside me, I will tell you this. It is soil. African soil. The gritty red earth of Cameroon that clung to my shoes and found its way into every crease of boyhood. Under the fingernails. On the shins after a fall. On the pages of a school notebook that sat too close to play.

You can see that soil from a thousand miles away. That bright laterite red. It looks like fire caught in the ground. Touch it, and your skin turns the same color. Almost as if the land is writing its name on you so you cannot forget where you belong.

There is an honesty to roughness. Smooth things can lie. A sealed marble floor tells you nothing of the struggle that shaped it. But a stone wall that scrapes your knuckles reminds you that the world has edges. That not every boundary is padded for your comfort. That sometimes the cut teaches you more than the cushion ever could.

Touch is how the world keeps us from drifting into abstraction. You can imagine courage all you want, but there is a very different understanding when your hand holds the rope that someone else depends on. You can theorize love, but it becomes real when you cradle a newborn and feel the tiny fingers tighten around yours with instinctive trust.

Here is the part we often avoid. Touch also reveals our failures. The cold grip of a hand that no longer reaches for yours. The texture of distance when two people sit close but feel worlds apart. Touch can expose truth faster than words ever will.

I think that is why technology tries to replace it. Because touch makes us accountable.

If you want to remember who you are, go outside. Put your hands on something older than you. Rough bark. A weathered brick. The soil beneath your feet. Let it remind you that life is not a simulation. Pain can be a teacher. Comfort is not the goal. Growth is.

The machines of my career taught me precision. The earth of my childhood taught me soul. Both lessons came through my hands.

What texture tells your truth. And when was the last time you reached for it.

I write

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