I waited to celebrate until I hit 366 because it’s a leap year.
One of the good things to come out of this cross-threaded year is my commitment to an eBird daily checklist streak that has motivated me to get out and see the birds. Every. Single. Day. If not far afield, at least out in the neighborhood, at minimum out the back window, stopping for breath, eyes trained on the feeders. It’s been a great streak, even if it’s been such a local one–for me, birding in coronoviral times is mostly limited to a walkable half-mile radius. But within that 0.5MR I picked up three lifers in 2020, a nemesis, even, and there’s three more weeks to go. Who knows what’s in store?
Since the diagnosis I’ve been bringing discipline to various aspects of my life without always thinking about it or even thinking about what being disciplined means. So while I’ve adjusted my routines, committed to an exercise regimen five days out of every seven, and maintained this checklist streak, it is an open question as to why. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, after all.
The best I can come up with is that the reasons vary. Some are easy: the biking and the boxing are attempts to forestall what progression I can, to maintain flexibility and balance and also generally to get into better shape, and, knowing myself and my dislike of exercise, a disciplined approach is the only way to sustain such activities on a regular basis. Call it discipline overcoming aversion.
The birding is something else–it is a conscious focus on making time for something I enjoy, and making it a habit, because even though I love it I still curiously sometimes need a forcing function to get my fundamentally lazy ass up and out and about. In that case the discipline is more accurately an aspect of defiance against inertia, an unyielding spirit, or, as my wife would more accurately characterize it, stubbornness.
So now that I’ve passed a year in this checklist streak, do I keep it going? What’s the next milestone, another year? Or something more ambitious, like a thousand days? After all, at some point the streak will inevitably end. Maybe that’s the point–this obstinance is a positive form of compensation, a quiet raging in the face of that which I cannot ultimately control, and a focus on the now, one chickadee at a time.
I’d like to hear from you if you’ve ever maintained a checklist streak: why did you do it? Why did you stop? What do you think of all of this?