Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Life By the Numbers

If you see me walking around my house for five minutes or so without a clear purpose, chances are I’m acting out a minor neurosis. I have a health ap on my i-Phone and suddenly, it’s not enough that I enjoy the pleasure of a daily walk around the city and appreciate the benefits of regular exercise. Now I need to know how many steps or miles I walked. If I arrive home and find it’s 8.9 miles or 19, 924 steps, I get mildly obsessed with rounding it off to 9 miles and/or 20,000 steps. If it’s too cold or rainy or late to walk around the block, I just walk around the house until the numbers click in and I get my little dopamine rush of satisfaction. 

 

In a similar fashion, my lifetime views of my TEDx talk I gave nine years ago is approaching 50,000 (I know that’s nothing next to Taylor Swift talking about getting a haircut, but hey, humor me here!). I’ve been checking it daily and there’s six more views to go. (If you haven’t seen it, check it out and you might just be the 50,000th viewer and win… a free Orff workshop?)

 

So I’m confessing here (as I have before on several of my 3,286 previous blogs viewed by 514,924 viewers over the past 11 years) that I’m a numbers nerd. I count my strokes when I swim, notice the 3,631 Facebook friends (and wonder how many I’ve met personally) and when I hear someone has passed away, often asked how old they were. Years back, I had an odometer for my bike that eventually broke and decided not to replace because I was getting too obsessed with the miles ridden. My wife tells me that my walking Health ap might have a switch that works for biking and I’m resisting with all my might seeing if that’s true. Enough is enough. 

 

That was 322 words up to the end of the last sentence and I’m thinking I should keep writing until I hit 500. 

 

But I won’t. 

 

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