The sense of smell is one that I am not sure about in a few ways. I don’t really know its purpose. It never helped me with my job, I think. If there are variations in smelling, can we even tell if we have a strong sense of smell or a weak sense of smell? It did not happen to me, but many people recently experienced a loss of their sense of smell due to a particular virus. Other than the occasional, “I am tired of not being able to smell my food” comment, I have not heard any negative consequences to losing it.

Which brings me back to the purpose. Why do we smell? Wait, that didn’t come out right. Unfortunately, we do smell so maybe that is the right way to say it. And we spend an extraordinary amount of money on trying to smell differently that we actually smell. Animals use smell for identification. I refuse to discuss what they smell in order to know, “That was Ralphie the German Shepherd from down the road”, but they know who did it and exactly where they did it. Could we identify each other by sense of smell? Thousands of years ago perfumes existed, so if we could, then why did someone start disguising their identity?

They say that one of the strongest memory cues is smell. One of my favorite book series is called the Foundation series. Many years in advance of our current time, it claimed people occupied thousands of worlds. While the author did not elaborate much, he had the characters state upon arriving at a new world that each world smelled different. Won’t that depend upon where you land on the planet? Sure does around here, because I can think of a lot of places not to land. Don’t you know that you are getting close to certain places before arriving by smelling them? Or they get off the ship and we say, “Here you can stay in these college dorm rooms, they don’t mind moving down the hallway for a few days.” What was also described was the fact that people get used to it and no longer notice it as a different smell. It becomes normal.

While I do not think that I have needed my sense of smell for my work, others certainly do. Anyone in the food industry or personal hygiene need it. Smell can be a warning in certain situations, like smoke or in mines. My warning came when I got too close to the inflatable slide in our gym, where all of the 7th graders had parked their shoes before climbing. My goodness. The warning told me that I needed to go supervise a different activity.

Hopefully, you find that your sense of smell leads you in the right direction, maybe even to having a Happy Friday.

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