The measure of the uncountable
A story about a change of perspective
A few months ago, convinced by the latest protest of my jeans that didn’t fit me even after my most resolute and acrobatic attempts, I decided to go on a diet. Since I like doing things right, I bought an electronic scale to weigh everything I ate, from breakfast to dinner.
During the following weeks, my meals were prepared only after a careful evaluation of the quantities of the allowed food, which was religiously weighed and cooked according to the directions given to me by the nutritionist. My daily routine began to be marked by this ritual, by “measuring”, by quantifying what I fed on, before assembling it into a dish that would be pleasant and tasty enough to satisfy me.
Week after week, a clearer awareness has grown in me. We tend to measure everything: at what time we wake up, how much food we eat, how many blocks we go past to get to work, how many activities we complete at the end of the day, how much money we earn, and the list could go on and on. Our daily life is scanned by the habit of “measuring” and quantifying the reality applying the most disparate reference systems: time, distances, what we have and what we would like to have, where we live and the people we meet.
I had never noticed it, at least until now, maybe because in my job numbers and figures play an important role. From the moment I became aware of our “addiction to measuring”, of our deeply human need to give a definite horizon to things, my life has changed. Or rather, my eyes have opened, really opened, and this, has allowed me to see reality and life as a whole in a completely different way: it isn’t an assemblage of elements that can be listed, changed or removed as you like anymore, but something unique, organic, vital, immeasurable. Life that gives life.
Children have always been great teachers in this. Their freshness of vision, their being deeply attached to what is natural and, at the same time, free from all the cultural superstructures that make adults so myopic, allow them to access to a range of experiences and perceptions we can’t achieve.
A few days ago, discussing with my nephew, Giorgio, about who loved the other the most, I got an answer that left me speechless: to my words “honey, I love you from here up to the sun” my nephew, with all the naive truth of his five years, answered: “Aunty, love isn’t measurable!”.
That sentence struck me as a punch in the face. Culturally, we are so used to measuring what surrounds us, what we do, even our aspirations, that we have forgotten there are things, in life and reality, we can’t measure. Love, as my English teacher would say, is uncountable.
So I wondered: where does the need to measure everything come from? In an attempt to find an answer to this point, I came across the phrase of the physicist Marina Cobal. To the question “why do we measure?” Cobal replies: “Measuring allows us to know, describe, control any physical system in the best possible way”. Measuring becomes a way to understand and dominate reality.
Has it always been like this? My university studies don’t remind me of it. The ancient thinkers didn’t feel the need to break down reality into smaller and easily understandable units.The Chinese philosophers, for example, believed that the ultimate reality, which unifies the multiple phenomena we observe, the Tao — the way, or process of the universe — incorporated all things, both animate and inanimate, into a continuous flow of change.
For the Greek philosophers, on the other hand, the world was a kosmos, an ordered and harmonious structure, a real living organism in which every part had the purpose of contributing to the proper functioning of the universe. No anxiety to measure, therefore, but the full awareness that the whole is worth more than the sum of the single parts.
This approach, we could say “holistic”, survived until the advent of the Seventeenth century, when the Scientific Revolution gave a violent change of perspective. The notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe that, with ups and downs, had crossed the centuries permeating their culture, was substituted by the idea of the world as a machine. The need to measure in order to know, replaced a broader way of understanding and penetrating the reality, while our senses were completely excluded from scientific research because they provide non-measurable information.
After all, thinking about it, I feel a little relieved. It isn’t my fault if my little nephew blamed me, reminding me that love is not measurable but it’s a mechanistic-reductionist thought! If it weren’t for Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes and the rest of the gang, I wouldn’t have faced those two impudent eyes that scrutinized me with disapproval.
Worried about measuring everything, we have forgotten how changing point of view can help us to have a different perception of reality and how, through our senses, we can acquire information that no measurement is able to give. Taking a few steps back and looking around is enough to understand that things are often more complex than they appear to be at first sight: a single skyscraper becomes a city, a blade of grass an entire prairie, what at the beginning seemed only a river merges with the immensity of the sea. Everything is teeming with life, sounds, colors, smells which allow us to know and recognize ourselves as part of something larger and, at the same time, transcending us.
It’s paradoxical, but, even though we live in a world where technology connects us in real time, breaking down space-time barriers, we often miss that we are just a cell of a larger organism and that, what we do every day will have an effect not only on us or our children but on the system as a whole. We are called the indoor generation as we spend most of our existence in closed spaces and have forgotten that a wall isn’t enough to separate us from the world we were born in and we are inextricably linked to.
“The major problem in the world is the difference between how nature works and what people think”
Gregory Bateson
So, how do we recover the awareness of this bond?
Perhaps, we should go outside more often, out of the offices, out of the warm and welcoming homes we have built, to embrace a wider horizon, to understand that the universe surrounding us isn‘t a stranger, it isn’t separated from us. We must teach our children that life isn’t in front of a videogame or a PC screen, but it’s out there, in the sun, in the wind, in the rain and that, all of this feeds us and makes us alive because it’s part of our DNA. We must educate ourselves, and educate them, to “feel”, not to measure. We must do it, before it’s too late, because our ecosystem and us are one and both our lives and our survival are mutually dependent.
It’s a beautiful day today and Giorgio and I have decided to go to the beach. Even if the summer is long over, for us, seafarers, the call of the salt, of the sun, of the sand under our feet, is irresistible. The beach is almost deserted and Giorgio plays on the shoreline gathering shells and making sand castles with a makeshift bucket. I look at him from a distance, I smile at him, then I decide to go bathing. The water is cold but the need to dive is too strong, I feel it in my blood. I dive in without thinking too much and, once underwater, I open my eyes and stop there for a time I can’t define. I feel like my skin is dissolving and the border between me and the rest of the world simply doesn’t exist anymore: at the end, I’m the world and the world is part of me. The blue water of the sea, the boundless sky, the beach that is lost in the horizon, the love for my nephew, the peace that invades me, everything is wonderfully uncountable.
