Neither does the tree hold back its leaves

but lets them glide away

This newsletter marks the 37th post I’ve written, nearly all at the twice-weekly rate except for the very beginning of my Substack existence. For a long while, ideas bumped around in my head pretty constantly. A list of topics also resides, shrinking and growing by turns, in my world domination notebook. Sometimes I’ve even had 2-3 newsletters written and queued up, like airplanes on the tarmac.

Lately, though, not so much. My work life has been busy, I’ve been nurturing plants, and summertime travel has begun to ramp up. I started thinking I could let the newsletter streak go, then return to it with refreshed thoughts.

Deliberately snapping a streak is a struggle against nature, though. What makes a streak so compelling? If you look this up, you’re going to find a lot of websites about Snapchat streaks. My kids could explain this phenomenon to me, but I’m not really interested in learning about that kind of streak. I think I had Snapchat for about 5 minutes before I determined it was not comprehensible for a person my age and deleted the app. But still, it’s the act of the streak, of relying on yourself to do a thing and then do it again, and again, that keeps us coming back.

Where I keep all the lists…

I have friends who participate in running streaks, and I have done this too. One of my favorites used to be the Frozen Feet challenge sponsored by a local running organization; a mile (running, walking, snowshoeing) outside every day in January is all it required. January in Montana can be a tough adversary, so that was a good activity for ensuring some outdoor time.

I had this app for a while called HabitBull which exploited the satisfaction of an addictive streak to push the user into developing good habits. You could enter whatever habits you wanted, and adjust their frequency to match your needs. For example, you could ask it to track whether you scrubbed your sink every other day. You could set it up to track your expressions of gratitude three times a week.¹ It created charts and logs and all kinds of reports that a data-minded person might wish to analyze themselves with. It celebrated when you logged a certain habit a number of times in a row!

Diets are a kind of eating streak, and of course there’s the athletic winning streak which kinda makes you want your team to lose just one, so there’s not so much damn pressure. That pressure is what makes streaks so damaging, I think.

Frozen Feet, 2019

We should do a thing because we want to do it, not because it’s part of a checklist² or because it will transform us into somehow better people³ but because it makes us feel good internally. I liked getting outside for a mile every day in January and if the Frozen Feet challenge made me do it, sign me up. But tracking expressions of gratitude…that’s just self-defeating. And silly.

Habits, I think, may be a beast different from streaks though they could be related. The habit becomes ingrained where the streak is a form of marking achievement. The inimitable Mary Oliver said of animal habits,

The bird in the forest or the fox on the hill has no…opportunity to forgo the important for the trivial. Habit, for these, is also the garment they wear, and indeed the very structure of their body life. It’s now or never for all their vitalities — bonding, nest building, raising a family, migrating or putting on the deeper coat of winter — all is done on time and with devoted care, even if events contain also playfulness, grace, and humor, those inseparable spirits of vitality. Neither does the tree hold back its leaves but lets them flow open or glide away when the time is right.

An animal must do a thing. It lives only to wear that garment and to wear that garment only. Like human artists who are compelled by their own talent, these creatures are guided by instinct and by necessity. Humans have much more choice, but we would be better off, I think, if we could find our own necessities and cling to them. I’ve quoted Annie Dillard on this before but here she is again. We ought to develop our habits, and keep them because they are what make us better people.

And what about this newsletter? I love writing it. Some people seem to enjoy reading it. And I did keep the streak alive here with #37. But if next Tuesday comes along and no EastKeep appears, you’ll know I found another garment to wear, at least for a week.

1. If you force yourself to express gratitude by using an app to remind/track you, is it really gratitude that emerges, or do you simply develop a deep, existential resentment against yourself instead because you are unable to generate positive thoughts toward others without technology telling you to do it? Deep questions.

2. I’ll be real here and admit I love me a checklist and lists of things. I have them everywhere.

3. according to what measurement? I’m sure something in a fucking magazine.