The Power of the Streak: 1,000 Days Down
Tucson, Arizona
Today is officially my one-thousandth day in a row of being active outside. That's 1,000 days in a row, without fail, without excuse, without saying, "oh, I guess I'll just take a by today and pick it back up tomorrow."
No.
Every. Single. Day. Excuses be damned. Reasons against don't hold. Instead, every day is spent acknowledging the Resistance and overcoming it anyway.
But fighting the Resistance is difficult.
In Steven Pressfield's work The War of Art, he talks about the Resistance as the negative force we feel that works against our desire to accomplish these great and meaningful goals in our lives. It can take many forms, and some of them are undeniably powerful.
Some small examples of Resistance include the tiredness that we might feel in the morning after a poor night of sleep. It could be the busyness of your day that makes you think you don't have the time to complete your goal. It could be other people speaking negativity into your life, trying to bring you down to their level of ineptitude and general lack of forward progress in their own lives. Especially with writing, fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, fear of criticism, and generally most types of fear are types of Resistance.
For Outside 365, some monumental forms of Resistance include illness, injury, physical pain, the groaning of our bodies on some days saying that it's had enough and that it can't possibly walk another mile. A surgery is Resistance. A hospitalization is Resistance. The Resistance has broken me down more than once.
Enter the Streak
I've read in the past about the power of streaks—whether in working out, doing creative work like writing, reading, doing a religious practice like meditation, or some other beneficial activity that inherently is prone the Resistance. And while I had tried shorter streaks in the past, there was nothing in my life that I felt passionately enough about to turn into a true streak, until I stumbled upon the idea of Outside 365.
The point of committing to a streak isn't to adopt a value that someone else says is important and then attempting to manifest it in your own life by doing a practice day in and day out, for a year. It doesn't work like that. First, you must determine for yourself what is valuable, what is intrinsically worth dedicating so much energy to fighting the Resistance every day. That value can't come from outside of yourself—it must come from within.
But once you've discovered that value, I've personally found that creating a streak does something incredible for your fight with the Resistance. If you don't give yourself an option, if you don't give yourself a choice, the Resistance loses its fangs. Oh, it's still there, don't get me wrong. It's still knocking on the door, trying to trip you up, drag you down, suck you back down into a hole of mediocrity and despair. Don't worry, you'll always have the joy of fighting that negative force.
But when you remove the question mark at the end of the phrase, "will I go outside today?" and instead say, "I will go outside today," the Resistance loses its bite. Instead, it simply becomes a force that must be overcome, that must be conquered, because you've removed all other options. You've removed any other way out besides overcoming the Resistance.
Excuses be damned, the streak must go on.
1,000 days down. Only another 60 or so years to go.
