An article on caring for patients in hospice that I recently read, recommended that the caregiver touch the patient. The author suggested that the effect of a simple physical touch was to make the patient feel better.
This assertion did not seem to be earth-shattering and made intuitive sense to me. By simple observation, physical touching seems to be something that humans do in aid of communicating with one another. Depending upon a number of factors (what is touched, when the touch occurs, the force behind the touch, etc.) a touch can have a lot of different meanings and convey a lot of different feelings.
Not long after reading this article, my attention was caught by a mother walking her two young children to school or daycare. The mother was chatting with them a bit as they walked but, generally, she was guiding them safely along the sidewalk. At one point, I noticed that she reached out and for no apparent reason briefly caressed the hair of one of her daughters. It did not seem that she was tryng to guide her daughter with this touch or attract her attention. As brief as the touch was, the mother was conveying and the daughter happily receiving some powerful but sublime communication of love.
Of course, we need to be careful about who we touch, how we touch them, when we touch them and when we touch them. But, we should remember to use this powerful communication tool when appropriate- particularly, in an age when so much of our communication (whether it is by phone, email, blogging or texting) is done in an environment which is devoid, depending upon the medium being used, of the evolutionary means of communicating using all of our senses – body language, sound volume, voice tone, hearing, sight and, yes, touch.