Not Counting

I hate to be cliche, but I had a moment about it being a new year.  In every other part of my life, I give numbers the healthy skepticism they deserve.  Almost everything numerical, to me, is meaningless as an end to itself: my weight doesn't reflect who I am, my face doesn't reflect my age, the amount of money I make has no connection with my value to this world (in my most humble opinion).  Even in my job in which I look at numbers and what they mean a lot, I don't give them much credence....because there's always a story behind them that will surprise you.  Numbers are rarely a reflection of lived experience.

In many ways, numbers have failed me time and again.

But for some reason, they've been haunting me recently.  Perhaps I've turned the quantitative corner, never to look back, but I can't help but keep thinking about things in terms of quantified time: I finished grad school 2 years ago, I've lived in my apartment 7 years, I haven't had a haircut for almost 3 months, I quit 1 job last year, I have done 0 significantly impressive things in recent history, I should give myself 4289 breaks because I'm my own worst critic.  The more I try to observe life outside these United States, the more I believe this tendency obsession with quantifying to be "Amurican."  If I can count it significantly then it must be important and, thus, good.  Even if it's bad.

Despite all of these tallies, the one thing I can claim as countless is the number of times I've started something only to stop too soon. How many projects lay on the dining room table of my life incomplete?  How many self-help steps are left to check off the list? How many miles are left to be counted by my 12 fitness tracking apps?  Countless.  How many good ideas have I not made good on because I'm afraid of what will happen?  How many opinions have I not shared because I want people to like me for who I'm not?  Countless.

As I start really defining this "countless" genre, I can see that many of them are important...in their own ways, of course.  They could lead to things like being healthier, happier, sharper creatively, braver, generally a better person.  Those I give up on.  The stuff that doesn't really matter...like the number of years I've lived in one place...that I can give you an almost perfect accounting for.

Without quantifying or even summoning the word benchmark which is such an over-hyped, bullshitty buzzword, I'm making a pact with myself that in this year I will make good on a couple "countless" things...because they're worth it.  But the method, I think, is key.  And my method deliberately stays away from counting.  Ticking off a box or checking off on a list makes the content of that action so pointless.  All of life, then, becomes about hitting that next "mark."  I don't want to live life this way.  Maybe that is the only thing that I will choose to accomplish this year and that would be tremendous: giving up counting.

Everything I do, I want to count for something...just not for the meaningless tally it often becomes.