Day 67: Losing Sense

The question is, if you had to let go one of your senses, which would you choose to lose?  Your eyesight?  Perhaps your hearing?  What about smell?  Would you let go of the ability to touch?  Or maybe taste?

It's an assignment for Rich's psychology class and we're debating the different sides.  He chooses to be deaf, says he couldn't really live without the others.  He cooks for a living, so smell and taste are out of the question.  To lose your eyes is to lose your independence, and even as he squints to clean his own spectacles, I know he thinks his eyes are as good as new.  And touch, well touch is what gives harmony to our lives.  It is the sense that adds rthymn, like his steady heart that bumps through his t-shirt when we're lying in the dark.  

But I know the truth about his decision.  It's the ear plugs all over again.  To lose hearing is to lose the nagging voice beside you that says you're going seven miles over the speed limit.  Not the voice inside your head, the voice that is your wife.  The voice that corrects his english.  The voice that challenges his anything. My husband would forsake his ears and in doing so allow himself a world of freedom. 

What would you choose?  If you had to lose some sense of yourself, of your five, what would you give up?  I know these discussions are the stuff of philosophers and psychologists, but there's a truth behind each answer.  His truth is my voice.  And I'll try to pipe it down.