Have you ever noticed the extraordinary degree to which our lives are affected by the concept of metrics, i.e., standards of measurement?
We measure just about everything. How tall you are, how much you weigh, how big this body part is (size matters, after all), how fast you are, the list is virtually endless.
I suppose when people first discovered that things like movements of the planets could be measured and predicted, this must have seemed like having godlike power. The ability to measure certainly has its points and benefits.
But many years ago, when I got into serious musical studies, my common concept of life as a measurable experience took a serious hit. I started to discover that all sorts of well-measured formulas and methods didn’t really work. In finding locations of notes, and feeling the collective consciousness of other musicians in an ensemble, this was happening in ways I could not measure or quantify. It was just “there.”
There are many things that are often measured that don’t need to be. In her kitchen, my grandmother never once used a measuring cup in her entire life. She just “knew when it was right.” Granted, the stuff she made never came out the same way twice, but I don’t consider that to be a bad thing.
The ancient Romans built massive structures with no algebra, just a lot of X’s and V’s, and still they managed to make the pitch of the aqueducts happen with amazing precision. Some of their bridges are still in use. No one knows how they (or the ancient Egyptians with their pyramids) pulled this stuff off. But they did.
Our focus on the immediately gratifying power of numerical measurement I think blinds us to other capabilities of our hidden senses. I am an indoor gardener, and these basil seeds know from day one how big the pot is, and they adjust the size their leaves accordingly. How they do that, who knows.
There are all sorts of things that, quite frankly, cannot be measured. Courage, interest, desire, creativity, consciousness, inspiration, love, passion . . . they may exist in larger or smaller amounts, but it is very hard to put a number on them.
We place enormous faith in our ability to measure things, but it’s not the only way to do stuff. Measuring things is a very handy way for achieving a certain level of at least perceived control over a situation. But when you start measuring everything, sometimes the measuring itself skews the measurements, or even the entire outcome.
For example, in any school, there is always a great desire to measure each student’s “performance” . . . but many aspects of a student’s performance– I would venture to say the most important . . . are hard to measure. My mother once had a parent-teacher conference when I went to a new school, and they eagerly showed her all sort of graphs and grades, precisely measuring my academic performance, and she dismissed it all, saying, “Is he having fun? Is he fitting in?” These things are harder to measure, and so they tend to get neglected.
If I am getting paid to produce measurable results, educational or otherwise, then I will tend to focus on those aspect of the experience that I can measure and codify. Those measurements are then presented to the people paying the bills as proof that I am doing my job. Since non-measurable results can’t be measured as proof of work being done, this tends to skew the management process. Since time can be measured, one might spend time on something even though it does not need it, in order to show a measurable thing was done.
Many years ago, when I went to a doctor for my high school sports physical, he began by looking me in the eye and saying, “so– are you healthy?” Nowadays when I go to the doctor, some nameless factotum takes my blood without making eye contact. They want something they can measure. I think they’re missing the big picture if they don’t ask that simple question first.
I am starting to see the bigger picture there, that a great deal of our lives has been influenced by the mechanical view that all things can be numerically measured. This is inherently limiting. We have the power to feel things and execute things without really knowing how we are doing it. This subconscious sensibility, which created Michelangelo’s David and the Dome of the Roman Pantheon (to name but a few), is getting short shrift, in my opinion.
The ability to mechanically measure physical things certainly has immense potential for greater power, but the best things in life, to coin a phrase, are beyond measure.
©) Justin Locke
