Daring to imagine a time when numbers won’t rule our lives

We have been living a long time in the shadow of numbers. Since March last year, though it feels longer, it is numbers that have dominated our days and shaped every aspect of our lives.

Numbers, like never before, have given life its feel. In their lower or higher value they have been like a chart of our emotional ups and downs.

This focus on numbers has of course been necessary. It has prevented untold illness and saved countless lives. We should be thankful for all the work that goes into producing the figures that are helping guide our way through.

But let’s not pretend it hasn’t also been hard dealing with all these numbers. Day in, day out the numbers come, until it seems they invade our sleep and disturb our dreams. There’s a mental and emotional toll to so many numbers, and that’s true for all of us, not just those like me who are challenged by maths.

For more than a year and a half we’ve had the daily case numbers land around 8.30am like a double-shot of reality with the morning coffee. Then there’s the all-important effective reproduction number, or reff, something we’d never heard of but now talk about with the easy confidence of experts from Doherty or Burnet.

Numbers also come at us in the form of tests done, vaccines delivered, populations isolating, hospital admissions, travel distances allowed, densities permitted, timeline targets and many more.

Our attention on numbers, like it or not, will have to continue. Indeed, we have to brace for the worst numbers of all – probable over summer – in the toll of lives lost. These are the numbers we don’t even like to think about as numbers, knowing they are all names. Names with stories.

But if life is going to continue to be filled with numbers for the foreseeable future, we can take some consolation in the knowledge that the gradual opening up of Australia will return to us something we’ve missed for all the numbers, and that is words. Not words about numbers – we’ve had plenty of those – but words about everything else.