Everything seems to come down to being a numbers game. The amount of steps you take every day. What your blood pressure is. The grades your kid gets in school. The amount you save for retirement. The followers, hits, conversions and sales in your business. It’s all numbers driven in how we quantify and describe success and progress.
But… is that all there is to it?
There are two problems I see with this line of thinking. First, it seems to me the numbers fall short of truly describing the full picture and that success or progress should be based on more. I believe the numbers are important but there’s more to the story. For instance if you’re only concerned about becoming rich then when you are rich are you happy? If your entire focus is on your child getting 100% on all his classes but he’s a bully to other children is that cool? I believe too often we get hung up on the numbers that we forget there’s more to us than that. We don’t see the non-material aspects that make living worthwhile. We lose the ability to experience connection, emotion, alignment with everything and everyone around us.
The other problem with just focusing on numbers is we can focus on the wrong numbers that distort and distract from larger issues. Earlier this year our world was overtaken by a media storm regarding the Coronavirus. While the “regular” flu killed more people this year and was more severe in symptoms and loss time to students and workers that wasn’t what people focused on. The media and social media attention of this smaller, less severe and less damaging virus resulted in shortages for every day living supplies like toilet paper, cleaners and food. It resulted in our larger impacts in our economy dropping as companies restricted business travel and events were cancelled. While children were the least likely to get this illness, schools threatened video education and online learning. States of emergency were and quarantines were setup everywhere. We completely lost our sense of what was really the issue, the impact and instead caused a lot of problems with other important numbers that sustain us every day. I can’t help but wonder why we are so quick to jump from what we know to what we are told as being true, often without numbers to back it up.
It can be challenging to live well and define a good life when you are among the trends of numbers that are distorted or directing all of our attention. We forget we are more than what we look like on paper with our financials or what we measure up against another similar to us. Doing this primarily or as our main focus prevents us from using our own voice in the process of deciding what is right for our life. We give up the controls of directing our own fate to what society and numbers tell us we should be doing, caring about and responding on. Being different in that thought process can be a frustrating experience.
Overcoming these situations where we can too easily forego our own mind to follow others requires us to take responsibility for ourselves and our families. It takes us down a different path where we can see the big picture, look at numbers, compare and apply the facts to fit our needs. We use use real information to support our decisions and take us where we want to go and not where others are headed. That feels completely weird at first too. I see it as finding an alley off the busy main road that you go down and you’re not sure at first if what you’re doing is right but you keep going. You soon discover it feels free and you’re not shoulder-to-shoulder with others all trying to cram into a single train headed nowhere.
One of the small ways I’ve done this in my home but certainly shows how this works is when I changed what and how we buy every day supplies. I stopped going to places like Target and WalMart for detergents, cleaners and soaps. I stopped clipping coupons and looking for sales. I also stopped listening to the commercials telling me things were effective and safe yet the labels were filled with poison control steps and warnings. What happened was my numbers went up. There was more money in our family budget for other needs. There was less frequency to buy things we needed. More than the numbers I also saw us feeling better, becoming sick less often and our home feeling and smelling cleaner. I realized there was a better way for myself and my family to go when it came to making every day purchasing decisions that is different than the norm. However it works and our numbers show its also a positive decision we made.
When the Coronavirus wiped out the cleaning supplies, disinfectants, sanitizers and soap our family was alright. I was even able to share natural sanitizers with our son’s school when they ran short and couldn’t get other stuff! We had ample natural ingredients and products to wash hands and clean our home. We knew how to get and make more if we needed it without fear of price gouging or being without. There also wasn’t a need to hoard mountains of toilet paper either. We had what we needed and were responsible in what we purchased. We talked about what we heard in school and in the news and then we made decisions that were right for us to be protected and safe. We listened to the available information and took what was relevant to us so we could act in our best interest. Then we went on with our lives. That is what it means to live natural in times when everyone is running in hysterics.
I do think there are a lot of number games in life. Most are important but it is in how we look at them and use that information in the whole picture. Following the trends is not always going to get us to the right place that is right for us.
Including natural support in your life and breaking away from mainstream is possible. I invite you to take the Lifestyle & Wellness Questionnaire to get your free personalized report on where to start in your life: https://forms.gle/furfCZUBVKrqNR6M6