Living in the moment: your sense of smell

Smells generally approach us unawares, rather then us making a conscious effort to get to know them. They mostly travel from the nose directly to a part of the brain where cognition does not occur, which is possibly the reason why smells are so hard to describe and why they can elicit powerful feelings and memories.

To help in your decision to live longer, and more fruitfully, I suggest you purposely seek out smells, and give them your full attention as much as you can.

Peel an orange and notice the spray of zesty aroma. Enjoy the scent billowing out from hot dirt, or a brick path when it finally rains. Crush the leaf of a plant, for the sake of it, and see where it takes you. Run your nail through a lemon, just to smell what happens. When I do this I always remember a trip to Spain with my father when I was just ten years old.

A nasturtium leaf crinkled by my finger tips and I am in my grandmother’s garden, five years old perhaps, sitting on a worn concrete step watching the caterpillars chewing on them.

A sprig of thyme and I am in the hills on an island off Sicily. Jasmine in spring takes me to my father-in-law’s house where it runs as rampant in his garden as the wine and gelato on his balcony.

Bruise the small fruit of a yew tree and I am walking past ancient Greek tombs on a languid Mediterranean day with caper plants cart-wheeling from cracks between the dry stone, and cicadas drummed from eucalyptus trees.

Crush a marigold leaf and a spicy scent takes me spiralling through time to other instances when I have done the same.

Concentrate your nose on one aspect of the orchestra of smells that make up the air we breath. If you have the climate, the space and the ability, grow an old-fashioned tea rose in your garden. There are few smells so exquisite.

If you live in an area where citrus grow, then tip your nose towards the crisp white bloom of an orange and smell Seville!

Of all the flowers I know, there is one that stops me in time more abruptly than others: an evergreen shrub with the botanical name of Cestrum Nocturnum. This native of the West Indies has a raft of common names, including Lady of the Night, Queen of the Night, and Night-blooming Jasmine. It is an inconspicuous bush, despite being twice as high as the average human. It has clusters of small, pale green trumpet-like flowers. It looks like a weed, easy to ignore.

During the day it has no scent at all, but at night… it calls out like a Siren, the stamp of summer in the sub tropics. It can ship wreck people as they go about their evening chores, forcing them to catch their breath. One minute you are ambling along, thinking of something of inconsequence, and then suddenly an intoxicating cloud of scent transfixes you. It’s so potent and overwhelming that it can make some people feel slightly nauseousness. No stimulus breaks your train of thought so abruptly as a smell.

You don’t even have to leave the house for smells to have such a dramatic effect. Close to my bathtub I have some small bottles of essential oils. I use them to commute through time, to set the film of my rolling again from a distant point.

I bought one of these magic potions from the gift shop of the Abaye de Senanque in Provence. Whenever I sprinkle a few drops into the warm, engulfing waters of my bath I smell lavender. But it’s not just the relaxing nature of the vapour of the distilled flower spikes that I notice. It offers much more than that. Because in an instant I am in early summer in France, and I am taking a photograph of my wife sitting on an old stone wall. She’s wearing that white hat with the floppy brim that she bought just the day before, with a plunging background of purple-topped lavender between her and the abbey itself.

And, from there, my mind rushes across fields of sunflowers, and I’m suddenly enjoying a hearty dish of cassoulette under the olive trees, with a bottle of Sancerre to share, and then I am flying even further back in time, before even the storks of Alsace and the plane trees that run alongside the canal du midi, to our first visit to France and a small cottage on the edge of the Loire Valley and another meal of cassoulette, this time eaten under the shade of a pear tree.

Another of my options is a small bottle of distilled Himalayas cedar wood. It was bought in a small New South Wales country town, but it sends me packing to the hill-station towns of Darjeeling and Simla in northern India, and then to the tea plantations of Nuwara Eliya in the highlands of Sri Lanka.

As for my vial of orange distillate … again to Seville of course, but sometimes to the hills above Lisbon and oranges picked for breakfast, or to a small orchard just outside Pompeii, where the owners rent out simple concrete huts to travellers like us and water the full-grown fruiting orange with sulphurous-smelling water from the volcanic water table.

My time in my bath can cross years, my life expanding and consolidating as I simply lay there, looking lazy. 

Be aware though, you can forget to notice smells, even though they are all around you. And when that happens it’s like being happy but forgetting to notice you are happy.

Smells can bring back not only images but also moods. Douwe Draaisma, in his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older recounts smells evoking youthful memories, both good and bad. He notes Charles Dickens who ‘claimed that a mere whiff of the type of paste used to fasten labels to bottles would bring back with unbearable force all the anguish of his earlier years, where bankruptcy had driven his father to abandon him in the hellish warehouse where they made these bottles’.

It can happen to all of us. A friend of mine noted that he is always swept back to a youthful fling whenever he smells a certain perfume on a woman walking past in the street. ‘I get all mixed up again,’ he said. ‘It’s the sense of hope and anticipation, and eroticism and the magic of the night. And I know, sadly, that I will never have that girl again. I will never have that time again, and the nervousness and anticipation of going out with her.’

Image credit: elminium/flickr