Solving Problems With My Nose

My nose is much more important for problem solving nowadays than it was, say, in my 20s, and while that does tend to mean the problems are worse, I also can’t help but feel it means my life is better.

It is appreciably miraculous to me that I can detect foulness, even danger, with this purely chemical sense. Smell is impossible to intellectualize. It’s famously resistant to language; all you can really say about a smell is that it smells like something else smells. But it’s a little easier to use words to describe smells that send important signals, like “rotten.”

When I say that my life is better now that I use my nose more, I mean that this is a reflection of the fact that I’m more often using my whole body for the things it’s made to do. In more careerist phases of my life, my body has mostly been for appearing present in socially required places at socially required times, and then I would just park it there, squint my eyes, and spend all day either trying to learn how to do something unnatural by forcing information about it into my head using linguistic compression, or doing those unnatural things by following the instructions I had ingested.

I didn’t have to learn how to detect with my nose that a sweet potato was rotting in the pantry. I didn’t know that’s what it was at first, but I knew the instant I opened that pantry door that something was wrong. Finding it took a few seconds, and yeah, it was pretty gross, but I’ll tell you what: It was immensely satisfying to realize I had correctly identified and solved a problem without having a single thought.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I can think when I need to do something unnatural — happens all the time — but the less thinking I’m doing, the better things are going.