While doing my regular blog-land roundabout I came across a blog called The Spectacled Bean and a post labelled “Home Sweet Home: do you know where you belong?” The post referred to an interactive website (OECD Better Life Index) where you can find out which country best suits you based on what factors you hold most dear, such as environment, health, and safety:
Turns out, that based on my preferences… Australia is number 9 on my places of preference… oops. [There were many more countries on the list, but I don’t want to embarrass anyone by implying that I wouldn’t like their homeland – so I only screenshot the top 10!]
[Image source: screen shot of: OECD Better Life Index]
The only BIG problem with this hypothetical – and it is BIG – is that it didn’t ask – “do you like cold weather?” in which case I would have said “no, not really, it hurts my head” and that would have knocked out potentially almost everything except for Canada… and probably half of Canada if my geography is correct.
I played around with the widget-gidget-gadgets for a while to see how much things changed, and they did, but often not as dramatically as I assumed. If for example, I left everything set at zero, except the top three: “I just want a house and a job and show me the money” – then I could get the USA up to the top and Australia lifted to 5. Put in anything extra, and down Australia slid…
I then discovered that you can look up your own country and see how it fares on each factor. In Australia, for example, civic engagement was full marks, health, housing and education were very high, but we ranked very poorly on work-life-balance. I know a lot of you are from the US, so I had a look, and housing was your high scorer, whilst the work-life-balance was also your sore point.
You could also look up the individual factors and see who does well. For “Life Satisfaction” for example (something I had placed high on my wish list), several Nordic countries took the top places. For work-life balance (another factor I valued), Italy and Denmark scored well. And for health (another top priority), Canda, Australia and Switzerland were the top three.
What does this have to do with healing – especially since 99% of us aren’t going to go live overseas anytime soon…?
For me – just thinking about where to move the scroll-bars was fascinating – deciding whether health or safety matters more to me was an insight into myself that I wouldn’t get if someone just asked me a question. By sliding the scrolls up and down, I began to get a feel for what matters most to me.
In the past I have written about “Find your WHY” and the comments back revealed that many of you, were like me… it felt a bit hazy… as if the answer was there, but in a peripheral-vision way, at the edges of our sightline, not front and centre.
In a strange way, this button-scrolling gave me a bit of a clearer picture about personal priorities.
There’s never any right or wrong answer with these sorts of hypotheticals (I still can’t see myself cohabitating permanently with snow) – so whatever answer you get – HOLD IT LIGHTLY – don’t read too much into it… I’m eight countries removed from where I’m “supposed” to be… to which I say ba-humbug! I love my life (pain aside) in Australia.
But if you do have a spare few minutes – it is an insightful experiment.
Take care, wherever you are, Linda xox
[Thanks again to The Spectacled Bean for giving me the idea for this post!]
The Mindful Migraine 
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