Love Makes You Count

The sums we make in love are often in terms of 1+1=2 or ½+½=1 or sometimes in ways that maths just can't compute, like 1+1=1; however when we take numbers out of the remit of love, we can be even more calculating.

There are statistics and there are damned lies, we all know the score. People crunch numbers in an attempt to show trends, popularity, risk, criminality - it's all about putting a percentage on a line graph. And if the line goes up or down, people vex over what it means, and the factors that contributed to it, in an effort to try and predict or influence its movement.

Current events are spun with an eye to the statistical. The "number of crowds" at St Patrick's Day celebrations, Paddington Bear voted Britain's best animated character "of all time"; experts proclaiming the English language is shrinking. The Hot Word at Dictionary.com turns this statistical word shrinkage into an emotive subject, proclaiming words earmarked for the museum of the obsolete are "dying right now".

Elsewhere, studies show eating an extra portion of red meat every day will increase your risk of death "by 13% annually", while civilian war casualties become massacres depending on how many people are murdered by renegade soldiers. One death "is unfortunate", 16 becomes headline news.

And the modern day number fetish goes on. It's all a question of scale and strategy - and hoodwink. Discount coupon trading companies like Groupon skew numbers to present what looks like great deals to their customers, similarly major investment bank Goldman Sachs gets public attention when it's discovered they label their clients as muppets.

It hardly paints a pretty picture by numbers, does it?

But it's when we look at life in more simple digits, that things get a heart. Like the real-life Batman in Slovakia, who despite living alone in an abandoned building without water, heat or electricity, decided to don the cape of the dark crusader and help out in his local community.

Or the humble Hollywood actor with the big heart, George Clooney who was arrested for civil disobedience during a demonstration outside Sudan's embassy in Washington DC last Friday - which helped to immediately raise awareness of yet another humanitarian crisis to blight our world.

And maybe what counts for Clooney adds it up best for the rest of us, that when you have a passion for something, you find the courage to stand up and be counted.

He knows that only when we stop seeing fellow human beings as just numbers will we get our planet back on the right track. We need to count things, and hike up the numbers, but we need to count with love.

Because it's love that makes us count.

Yours in love,