An article today off of Reuters extols a Stanford study published in JAMA showing that giving people pedometers causes them to walk more and lose more weight. The original paper was based on interviews and a review of previous studies. It appears that the studies were all done in the US, and thus the findings might be entirely cultural, but it’s not a new observation.

Health plans have been giving out pedometers for some time now. It seems to be nothing more than a variation on what industrial engineers and political leaders have known for some time – that if you measure something, you will have more of it. In other words, the primary problem that confronts people is Awareness.

When people are aware of what they think is the right and proper thing to do, they do more of it. In the case of the pedometer, this is rather straightforward; more walking is a good thing. Well, up to a point it is. I remember James Fixx, the MENSA advocate and author of the first book that popularized running as a sport; he died of a heart attack while running because he wasn’t aware that he had a heart condition.

That’s the same kind of problem that industrial and political organization can run into as well. If you aren’t necessarily measuring the right thing, or if you measure one thing that requires a balance against an unmeasured thing, you can create more chaos than you ever thought was possible. When you measure something, you have more of it. Damn the unmeasured, we are judged on that which we have data on!

Which gets back to Awareness, or a greater understanding of what any given action does to our minds and bodies and greater world. Around Saint Paul there are now several cars with the total dead from the war in Iraq painted on the back. The idea is that people are forced to confront what we are doing at some random point in their every day life, and thus be aware of it. In this case, by measuring we hope to have less of something, but the principle is the same. I only hope it works.

The industrialized world we live in is very complicated, and people can only take in so much of it as individual bits and pieces. The reductionist way we approach life is that walking for exercise is a thing over here, the war in Iraq is over there. In fact, the two are closely related because we consume far too much oil and consider walking to largely be a sport rather than a mode of transportation. But that’s not how we try to understand the world. The connections between these bits and pieces are regarded as less important than the items themselves.

Awareness, which is to say a genuine awareness of what our lives are all about, is a holistic pursuit. As long as we examine our effect on the world as a disconnected series of actions, we ourselves will remain disconnected. To be Aware is to be connected to the world and to be more interested in the connections between people and actions than in the actions as isolated and almost random events.

If we measure something, we have more of it. I’d like to say that we could measure our connections and genuinely count our blessings and friends and family for this holiday. However, it may be best to take a moment and not count a thing. Consider what you have without counting for a moment and be truly Aware of the wonders around you. What’s there in your life without counting is what truly counts.