How do we fill the space between us?
Early on in the pandemic the World Health Organisation suggested that we use the term ‘physical distancing’ rather than ‘social distancing’ when talking about the 2-metre gap we were required to maintain between us.
It didn’t catch on. At the time I felt that ‘physical distancing’ was concrete and visual. It told us what we needed to do with our bodies to keep ourselves and each other safe. Whereas ‘social distancing’ spoke of an emotional severing and a collective isolation.
Whatever the intention behind the phrasing, the reality of ‘physical distancing’ has demanded a heavy price from many who have had to welcome life and mourn loss, without a hand held or a cheek stroked, fingers entwined or a body embraced. Touch was strictly regulated, even in the most intimate of spaces.
In public arenas around the world the handshake and the kiss, the touching of foreheads and the forceful hug have been replaced with elbow bumping, and fist knocking and even a little ankle tackling. Even the light touching of hands before your right is placed on your heart is now half a gesture of greeting.
However, I know people who felt very differently about this prohibition on touch. For them physical contact can cause anything from mild discomfort to profound distress. For them, the restrictions were a liberation.
Of our senses touch is probably the thorniest to handle in many working environments, whilst at the same time, it is the one increasingly cited in connection with well-being. We use touch to show support and offer comfort, to celebrate and to encourage. Touch is how children begin to explore the world and to make sense of their relationship with it.
As adults we supposedly refine that relationship, we’re guided to smooth off the edges, we learn social acceptability and hopefully touch literacy. And yet touch within the work space has become increasingly contentious, an act of invasion and harassment, which causes suffering and suspicion, driving some people from the work space and others into self-doubt and self-recrimination.
Therefore, in returning to the office how do we fill the space between us with touch literacy?
My working present is, like all of ours, connected to my working past, therefore the stories below are told as a way of connecting past concerns with the present question.
In my teens I worked alongside peers and younger teens who experienced the world in a wide variety of different ways, ways which normative society saw as problems to be solved.
One day I watched as a young girl whose temples were raw from repeatedly hitting them with her fists, calmly hold the reins of the pony she was riding. Along with the reins her hands held tightly onto two thick tissues. For her the texture of tissues provided an ever-present soothing touch.
In my twenties, a single conversation led to my training as a drama therapist, a very ‘out there’ idea. At the time, conventional health practitioners viewed it as either a wacky indulgence or a tedious inconvenience which had the potential to de-rail their preferred treatment regime.
Working therapeutically with creative tools means working with the mind, with the body and with feelings. It recognises what the body holds can be painful, what the mind has created debilitating, and that what feelings need is often release, however messy and difficult.
In my thirties I developed a community theatre programme where experienced artists learnt and performed along-side and in collaboration with people who’d not had, up to that point, creative opportunities.
Working with drama means working with the mind, with the body and with that intangible and for some troubling ingredient the heart/spirit/soul to create something new, genuine. Something that will transport, will inform, will challenge.
Working creatively and therapeutically means working with boundaries that are clear and where individual autonomy is respected. It can then be a place where touch is celebrated, a space of connection, compassion and cohesion.
Therefore, as we return to the office - What of the space between us?
Among our colleagues and our communities there will be those who carry different backstories and experiences. Some will have found the lack of face to face contact a liberation, flourishing in on-line collaborations and projects. Others will return with unease with memories that disturb, and others will return still blithely unaware of personal space and physical appropriacy.
Therefore, as we return to the office, there’s an opportunity.
An opportunity to revisit our own relationship to touch, how we experience it, how we offer it, and how we receive it. Not to think of it as something we left learning about and using creatively when we got to double digits.
Maybe we could even talk about it openly and with understanding and appreciation of the many different ways we experience it, what is good for me, and what is difficult for me and when you’ve overstepped my boundaries. Touch literacy is I believe a necessity for all. It is a proactive stance that squares up to toxic cultures of avoidance, blame and recrimination and seeks to replace them with realisation and reflection, understanding and change.
Bearing that in mind, I was touched is an expression of emotional engagement not physical invasion.
In the words of Maya Angelou
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The Space Between Us
La Caminante de Luna
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