Reading the Room (Before We Learned Not To)

We talk a lot about the limitations of language, how it often falls short, can’t quite get there, i.e. “no words”.

And I’ve been thinking about this limitation and how it intersects—actually crashes and smashes right in to—our five senses.

Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. I think they are the ones we should hold responsible for the limitation.

The whole human experience, we’re told, runs through these five. They’re our translators, our guides, our measuring sticks for what counts. But they’re also our boundaries. They shape what we think is real.

But what about the things that live outside them? The things that can’t be described, or even fully known, by these tools alone? There are many. Still, we try, and again, fall short.

One of my earliest memories lives in that space.

I must’ve just woken from a nap. Still in a crib. The room was yellow, and the sunlight had come in just so, that golden late-afternoon light, bending itself around the corners of the small room until the walls looked soft and pink-gold. Everything felt hushed, full, glowing. Calm.

I remember my feet in the air. Perched. Chubby. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I knew they were mine, but not fully. Like I was still being introduced to this body. Still arriving. Still getting used to the strange miracle of being here.

Entertained and fascinated, I laid there, babbling and looking at my feet.

My brain was still knitting itself together, learning how to map the world. My senses were just beginning to do their jobs. And still, even then, even without language or logic, I could read the room.

Not with my eyes, not really. Not with my ears. Not with any one sense. But I could feel the space. I could feel its energy, its shape, its weight, its flow. The spaces between the air drops. I could feel the presence of my mother even though I couldn’t see her. She and her soft brown hair were nearby.

That was reading the room.

And yes, we use that phrase all the time now. We say “read the room” to mean, understand social cues, track behavior, adjust accordingly. But as a baby, I didn’t know what was appropriate or inappropriate. I didn’t understand context. I didn’t even understand myself.

I was without ego. And yet, I knew.

I think we all did.

We were born with this ability to sense beyond the senses. To take in what wasn’t visible. To feel what couldn’t be touched. Before we were taught what to focus on, what to name, what to believe in.

And even now, I find myself trying to describe that memory using sensory language—"I saw," "I felt," "I heard"—but those words don’t really fit. They’re too small. Too literal.

Reading the room, back then, was like falling into everything. Being part of it, not separate from it. Not observing, not measuring. Just… being.

If I had to describe it, it wasn’t sound—but something like music. Not music you hear, but music you just feel. The room had its own tone, its own frequency. Some of it felt soft, some sharp. Some heavy and slow, some light and floating. Some of it tucked into the corners. Some of it brushed past and was gone.

It wasn’t sound exactly. And I didn’t listen for it. I just felt it. Alive and palpable.

That’s what it was to read the room. And not just rooms. Spaces hold energy. Places. People, too.

For people…it isn’t mood, it isn’t personality, it isn’t behavior. Those are layers, noise, the stuff we learn to scan for so we can belong, stay safe, figure out who’s who. But under all of that, there’s energy. In every single one of us.

And to try to explain it using the five senses—it doesn’t quite work.

Because when I, and probably you too, first learned what those five senses were, we built our world around them. We developed our neural pathways, practiced the rules, and came to believe that this—this measurable, nameable world—was the whole truth.

We pointed to our feet and said, “mine.” The baby fat on our ankles melted away as we moved through the world, and the senses sharpened, the mind got faster, the stories, ours and others’, got louder.

And in the process, we lost touch. (and there it is again—a sense word. Touch. But that’s how sneaky it is. How far it’s gone.)

We lost our relationship with the one sense that doesn’t have a name. The one that guided us gently, clearly, quietly—before all the thinking got in the way.

That knowing, that sense of energy, of truth underneath words. It just got quiet. Hijacked, perhaps, by our five senses. Or drowned out by all the new data we learned to prioritize. Either way, it slipped into the background.

And even now, the best word I have for it is knowing—but that doesn’t quite fit. Knowing sounds too much like thinking. Like information. Like something the brain does.

This isn’t that. Not a thought. Not a feeling. Not intuition or instinct or any of the language we’ve tried to give it. It’s a sense, maybe—but not like the others. Not five, not even six. Just something else. Something we had, something we used, before we learned how to explain things.

And I don’t know what to call it.

If you remember it too—if something in you is nodding along, even a little—can you help me name it?

Or maybe we don’t name it at all. Maybe that’s brain, and thought, and five senses coming in to claim it. And naming it cages it. Pins it down to make it smaller, more manageable, more human.

And it’s not meant to be that.

And today, as I’m looking at my feet, I just wonder…what did we lose when we learned how to live?

And mostly, how do we get it back?