For a while there, I was all about streaks. I had a Step Streak on my Fitbit, Snap Streaks on my Snapchat, and a WordPress Streak on my Jetpack App because I posted on this site every day for a while. Yep, I was a streaker. 

The first to go was my WordPress streak. I have to say I was always split about daily posting. I felt like I was finding content that was good, but it was tough to keep up the pace.  

At one point I was talking to some friends, but when I mentioned posting every day, my boy Bobby was like “Whoa, that’s too much.” He followed up saying that it might be too much for the audience, but it was definitely too much for me to sustain. Bobby reminded me that even though writing is my passion, it isn’t my job. 

Last summer swallowed my Snapchat streak. It was over three years old, so this is a sad story. In early August I got to a spot where I was focusing on a landscaping project, and everything else was ancillary. The streak got lost in these weeks, but I felt bad about spacing it. The end of it got me thinking that streaks are important, but that maybe it’s fine to let them go because they aren’t always sustainable.

I learned the most from the Fitbit streak. Over 500 straight days I did at least 13,000 steps. Often it was a lot more.  

Many times, I was well short of my goal, and it was getting late. There wasn’t much of a choice. Either save the streak or let it die. I went out in nice weather, cold weather, rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, sweltering tropical heat, and sweltering Connecticut heat.  

It felt good. I used words like “test” and “struggle.” I know I was only getting steps, but I invested it with meaning beyond exercise. It meant something to protect the streak. It meant more to push myself when I didn’t want to. The test wasn’t the steps: it was stepping when I was done, spent, tired and ready for bed. It reinvigorated my capacity to push myself. It reminded me of my strength. 

The best part of the end of the streak is that it wasn’t my fault. Somehow on our trip to Nova Scotia my Fitbit got confused. Although it recorded my steps, which were well beyond my goal, it didn’t add another day to my Step Streak.  

Even a month earlier, I would have been pissed. Not this time. When we got home, I was glad. I felt released from the streak. I was ready to move past it. 

Thoreau wrote about the end of his time at Walden Pond. He said “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.” 

Streaks taught me their lessons of effort, closeness, persistence, sacrifice and consistency. Thoreau left the pond with the immense lessons he learned, ready to apply them to his new life.  In a smaller way, I am learning the teaching from my lost streaks and investing them into my new day.