When you’re making decisions in your life, what usually wins out? Quality or quantity?

It is Seneca that said, It is quality over quantity that matters.

But how often do we purposefully bring quality into our lives?

Last weekend Nova and I headed to Montreal with my mom, my sister and her daughter. Five females and three generations set off for a short holiday via train.

My two-and-a-half year old niece Ruby usually sees Nova and I and her Aji (grandma) at least once a week, but she’s been very mama-focused lately. I remember Nova going through the same phase.

Yet after just a couple of hours on the train together, she easily started gravitating towards her Aji. She wanted to sit with her, talk to her, be with her. It was the first time in a long time that we were all forced together in one space with nowhere to go and nothing to do but be with each other.

Quality time.

I’ve noticed this with friends lately too. There are friends you meet for a two-hour dinner and you feel no closer to them.

Then there are others that you see for a day after two years and you feel so connected, so understood and loved (you know who you are!).

Quality connections

I’ve been applying the quality angle to everything in my life lately. I consider quality in consumer choices like food, fashion and my environment. But I also have been considering what I give my energy to, what I choose to focus on and how I choose to nurture myself.

Quality choices.

In Be All You Are, my 3 month group program, we meet once a week for an hour. Most of the women didn’t know each other before we met for the first time on zoom four weeks ago. Yet, we went straight to quality right away. We talk about our deepest desires, including the ones we are afraid to say out loud because we think they are too far out there. We share our fears related to losing a part of our current self-identity as we evolve and become someone new.

The thing is, when we focus on quality, it’s not just that we’re spending more, or up-levelling, or going deeper….we’re growing. Everytime we make a choice to ask a little more for ourselves and from ourselves, we grow into a more expansive, powerful version of ourselves.

So I invite you to consider, what would it look like if you approached your life decisions with quality as the primary driver? Today, mindfully choose quality and notice how your experience changes.

The real question, after all, is not the quantity of life, but its quality, its depth, its purity, its fortitude, its fineness of spirit and gesture of soul.
- Joseph Fort Newton

With love,

Kena xo

Kena Paranjape, Founder, All You Are