Reflections 5th November

On the Poverty of Measurement

Photo: Davina Burgess

No, I wasn’t intending to do a Reflection this week on account of being away, but the power of the reality of being away has dictated otherwise.

I’m writing this in the very first hint of first light this morning, in a big farmhouse high on Yorkshire Moors in the company of a handful of others with whom I have been meeting on Zoom every week for three years.

What has struck me forcibly is the poverty of the metrics we use to measure the drumbeat of our everyday lives. Time, Output, Performance, Profit. Things we can quantify in numbers, track, record, and clinically compare.

They are soulless, shallow and impoverished compared to the experience of meeting people we have come to know well but have not met for a year. Those with whom we do not “work” but who have an impact on what we do that is far greater than many of those with whom we do. Encounters that are measured in laughter, joy, beauty, love and other qualities that can be sensed but not measured or compared…