wedding day smile

I’m not a mother, but I’ve heard that a mother’s love sometimes can be described as “an awful love.”

I’ve witnessed a bit of that awful side over the past couple of days, as female friends of mine have taken to social channels, like Facebook, to share photos and express melancholy feelings, while leaving their first-year kids on college campuses for the first time.

It seems to be a time for “both sides of things.” Joni Mitchell famously pointed to these times in life with her “Both Sides Now” lyric, “something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.”

For all the different kinds of data analysis and exploration that’s happening right now on the business analytics front, wouldn’t it be interesting to apply a “Things Gained vs. Things Lost” filter to our own life experience data and examine the results?

What if you could quickly and easily assess all that you’ve gained and lost along life’s way? Would you conduct that type of personal analysis?

Or, maybe you wouldn’t prefer to examine your life in terms of gains and losses? Maybe you’d apply a different filter to your life experience data?

If I could analyze my life experience data, I’d create a frequency distribution report to reveal all the occurrences of my greatest personal joys – those moments when my smile was widest.

Until then, like my friends who are mothers of first-year college students, I’ll have to rely on pictures to record and reveal my most significant milestones. Pictures like the one, taken on my wedding day a few years ago, when my smile stretched to its limit.