No, this is not an advertisement for Sleep Number beds. I’ve never been in a Sleep Number bed. I doubt that I ever will because I hear they are rather pricey! But I agree with their philosophy that we each have all kinds of numbers that are special to us. Numbers rule our lives! Well, insurance companies rule our lives, but that is another blog post!
We each have the number of hours of sleep each night that make us feel our best. Mine is nine and I haven’t achieved that in over a decade. What is your ideal hours of sleep? We each have an ideal weight as well. Mine is 175. I’m at 198 right now. Thank you lockdown!
Would you bend down on a rainy day to pick up a penny off the sidewalk? Not likely. But what if it is a hundred dollar bill? More likely! Each of us, most likely, has an amount for which we would make that sacrifice.
When you look for a new job, you go into that search with a number in mind. Yes, if they pay me $100,000 I will accept an offer.
I’m a counselor and do a lot of couples counseling. Often, a big issue is the amount of intimacy. Each partner has an ideal number of nights they would like to be intimate with their partner. The closer the numbers, the happier the couple…at least in that area of their relationship. If my client couples’ numbers are 7 and 0, I have a lot of work to do!
Financial advisers tell each of us that we need to have a certain amount set aside for our retirement. Getting that information, and examining our lifestyle, leaves us with a certain dollar amount in our mind that will make us feel comfortable about our closing years. We use that number to guide us in our savings decisions.
One more! When I trained for a marathon in 2001, the training was run by numbers. I trained with the Leukemia Society’s Team in Training. We ran together every other weekend. Our first run was 6 miles. We added two miles every time we met. The goal, in training, was to eventually get to the number 20. The idea was that if you can run 20 miles, you can run 26. Not so fast (pun intended)! I think my personal training number should have been 26, because boy did I struggle that last six miles!
There is usually something that happens in my week that triggers my blogpost idea. This week it was a conversation with a teenage client about his feeling about the lockdown and when is should end. He was for opening up now, because only 111 people in Lehigh County have died from Covid-19. I didn’t argue with him. That wasn’t my role. Also, I am not arguing with my readers in this non-political blog. But it got me thinking about numbers. We must each have, somewhere in our mind, a number of deaths that affect the way we think about this whole thing. I know there is more to our opinion than just that. But numbers rule our lives and our actions.
I did that whole post about numbers without mentioning Calculus or Trigonometry. You know the number of times, in my life, I have used what I learned in my high school Trigonometry class? 00000000000000000000
A Semi-retired Kind of Life 