Guide to Feeling Good #3: Touching the World Like an Octopus
The traditional understanding of the human being has imprisoned us within invisible armor, thick shells, and insurmountable distances. As we walk through the city, board a bus, or sit in a café, we retreat into our inner fortresses; we tend to see the sea of people around us merely as “background scenery.” Yet life is worn down, shallowed, and drained of color precisely in these moments of contactlessness. For this very reason, we must learn to be like an octopus.
We must stop looking at the world only with our eyes, our memorized patterns of politeness, or our protective distances; instead, we must extend our mental and emotional suckers outward. For life expands only to the extent that we touch and allow ourselves to be touched.
Key Physiological Systems
Octopuses possess one of the most unique biological blueprints in the animal kingdom, characterized by a decentralized nervous system, a blue-blooded multi-heart circulatory system, and specialized integumentary control.
Decentralized Nervous System: Roughly two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons reside in its arms rather than its central brain. Each arm functions with a high degree of autonomy, processing tactile and chemical sensory data locally to direct movement and suction without waiting for central brain commands.
Three Hearts & Blue Blood:
Systemic Heart: Pumps oxygenated blood throughout the rest of the body.
Branchial Hearts (2): Dedicated hearts located at the base of each gill that pump deoxygenated blood through the gills.
Hemocyanin: Oxygen is bound by copper-rich hemocyanin rather than iron-rich hemoglobin, giving their blood a blue color and making oxygen transport efficient in cold, low-oxygen marine environments.
Rapid Color-Changing Skin (Integument): Controlled directly by the central nervous system, their skin contains three layers of specialized cells:
Chromatophores: Pigment sacs expanded or contracted by micro-muscles to display red, yellow, brown, or black shade
Iridophores & Leucophores: Reflective cells that bounce back ambient light, producing iridescent greens, blues, and whites.
Papillae: Muscular skin projections that dynamically alter surface texture to match rocks or coral.
Jet Propulsion & Hydrodynamics: Water is drawn into the mantle cavity through an opening and forcefully expelled through a muscular siphon (funnel). This siphon can flex 360 degrees to direct high-speed backward or forward movement.
Flexible Skeleton-Free Body: Lacking both internal and external bones, the only rigid structure in an octopus is its chitinous beak. This hydrostatic body design allows it to squeeze through any opening larger than its beak.
Sıla-yı Rahim: Establishing Every Bond Through Mercy
Before unfolding our tentacles, we must remember the prophetic concept that gives this act its true meaning: ‘sıla-yı rahim’ — maintaining the bond of kinship, and in a broader sense, establishing our connection with everything through mercy.
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Sıla-yı rahim means recognizing that every being we encounter is, in a sense, our kin — woven from the same fabric of existence, breathing the same air, sharing the same longing for meaning. It is to see the silent mercy breathing upon us and, through empathy, to perceive that same mercy breathing upon everything.
When we extend our tentacles toward the world, we do so not to possess or to intrude, but to reconnect. Every touch becomes an act of sıla — a reunion, a restoration of a bond that modernity has taught us to forget.
The Taxi Driver’s Regard, the Attendant’s Greeting: The First Suckers of Contact
Each sucker of an octopus does not merely hold the rock it passes over or the water it touches; it tastes it, smells it, and establishes a bond with it. In the hustle of city life, when we catch each other’s gaze in a taxi driver’s rearview mirror and ask a sincere “How’s your day going, chief?” — that is precisely the first touch of that mental sucker.
Noticing: A heartfelt “Take it easy” greeting offered to the attendant we encounter in the corridor in the morning pulls them out of their armor of invisibility. It shows that we have noticed them, that we feel their presence and their labor. This is sıla-yı rahim in its smallest, most daily form: the refusal to let another human being remain unseen.
Joining the Flow: These small contacts are human awakenings that carve a notch into the mechanical flow of the day. The moment we touch the other’s story, we step beyond the boundaries of our own narrow self — and in that stepping beyond, we return to a kinship we never truly lost.
Airplane Seats and Café Tables: A Forgotten Collection of Stories
The stranger sitting next to us on a flight, the person whose table we share in a café, or the one we catch eyes with while waiting in line… Each one is a novel whose cover has not been opened, not yet read. And each one is, in the language of sıla-yı rahim, a relative awaiting reunion.
To approach with octopus-like flexibility is not to impose ourselves on these people or to approach them like an interrogating officer, but to extend a tentacle by attuning to their frequency — to practice empathy as a form of mercy.
- Feeling the curiosity or fatigue carried by the passenger in the next seat as they look out the window,
- Accompanying with a faint smile reaching into the past in the eyes of an elderly person sipping their tea alone in a café corner,
- Being ready for people’s stories; generously offering the flexibility, non-judgment, and interest to listen to that story.
In each of these acts, we are not merely being polite. We are performing sıla — reconnecting severed threads, honoring a kinship that transcends blood and geography.
A Somatic Humanity: Becoming One with Life
An octopus, while taking the shape of the crevice it enters, does not strip itself of its own being; on the contrary, it multiplies its existence by integrating with that crevice. Touching the stories of others does not diminish us either. Quite the opposite:
Spiritual Expansion: Absorbing a taxi driver’s longing for home, an attendant’s pride in their child, a traveler’s experience; enriches our own narrow world of experience. The mercy we extend outward returns to us as a deeper capacity to feel, to understand, and to be present.
Collective Healing: In an age where loneliness and alienation have reached their highest level, a single random and sincere contact neutralizes like an antidote both the other’s loneliness and our own for that day. This is sıla-yı rahim as medicine — the restoration of bonds that heal not only individuals but the collective soul.
Life is not the adventure of those who protect themselves within their shells; it is the adventure of those who courageously extend their tentacles outward, who are not afraid to feel the world and to be felt by the world.
To be like an octopus is to touch every moment of life, every corner, and every person we encounter with our human suckers; to see the silent mercy breathing upon ourselves and, through empathy, upon everything; to be colored by their colors; and to pass through this world “by touching as we pass” — fulfilling sıla-yı rahim with every step, every gaze, every breath.
