“To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven” Ecclesiastes 3:1 and Turn! Turn! Turn! by the Byrds, 1965.
Your dog sits by the edge of the bed and locks her deep brown eyes onto yours with a soul-piercing stare. It’s a cold, New England, mid-autumn morning and through the open window wafts the winey scent of fallen apples and frost melting on gold and russet fallen leaves. The morning beams of light bring intense shades of azure and auburn and you can hear the drumming of a ruffed grouse on the hillside.
Your dog is telling you that this is a special morning; we may not see another like it again. Let’s get out and climb the hill or wade the trout stream. But you ignore her plea, head to the computer, and miss the moment.
You open your daily habit tracker on the computer and don’t know where to start. Meditation? Journaling? Scripture reading? Yoga? Peloton? Tagalog on Duolingo? You start on your daily habits and keep up your streaks. But you’ve missed a unique autumn morning that you can’t bring back. Your dog gives you a doleful, sideways look, conveying the canine wisdom of the price paid for structure and habit.
I have a friend who was a contender for the Olympic rowing team when he was in his forties, competing against athletes half his age. In the boathouse, amid the gleaming shells and oars he would share the secret of his rowing success: “Don’t do it daily.” He believed (and proved) that rowing performance did not decline much with age; but he firmly believed that there was a diminution in the ability to recover. The secret was to find that personal rhythm of workout and recovery, how long to rest before getting the boat out on the water again. It isn’t a daily pattern, and individual rowers must figure it out for themselves.
Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, writes about the time that he interviewed Jerry Seinfeld about the eponymous productivity technique of marking big, red Xs on a calendar for every day that you do an activity. According to Burkeman, “the Seinfeld Technique has come to mean "work on what matters most to you, every single day, without fail." But to Seinfeld himself it mainly just seemed to mean that you have to put in effort, repeatedly, over the long haul. No wonder it didn't strike him as a particularly astounding system… What matters, in the end, is what gets created, not whether the person doing the creating has an impeccable record of red Xs”
Don’t do it daily. Give up on the streak. But keep up the effort. Find your rhythm.
And don’t miss those important moments that you can never bring back.
Love your contrarian title and the call to not be so obsessed with our habits that we miss out on the richness of life that you describe so well.
Special days like the one you described come fewer and further between than the number of tasks on a to-do list. The to-do list will be there tomorrow, I constantly have to remind myself, this sunrise will not.