The Trick Was Never the Walk. It Was the Door.
Same autopilot, opposite direction. The streak didn't need more grit. It needed less.
It's 5:00 somewhere!!!!
That was the line I used every day as I got off work early in the morning. My shift at the time was midnight to 8am, and sometimes 10am if I was working overtime. Tesla wasn't even a thing back then, but somehow my car would auto-drive itself to the liquor store each and every morning. Some of the time I didn't even know what was going on. I would walk in and grab the cocktail of the day. During the week it was vodka, or either a 6 pack of Heineken. Either way, it was party time.
The crazy part is, my car would auto-drive itself. It was not a decision. I did not stand in the parking lot every morning and weigh my options and choose the liquor store. My hands were on the wheel, technically, but I was more of a passenger than a driver.
For a long time I thought the scary part was the vodka. The 6 pack. The cocktail of the day. It wasn't. The scary part was how little of me was actually involved. I had built a machine that ran without me, and it was carrying me somewhere I never sat down and picked. And it had been carrying me there for years.
What turned the car around was not willpower. It was two heart attacks, one in 2015 and one in 2020, and I am not going to dress that up.
The first one did not do it. That is the part that still gets me. A heart attack is supposed to be the thing that stops everything, and mine came and went and the routine barely noticed. I healed up, and life just resumed. Same mornings, same stops, the same line about it being 5:00 somewhere. The autopilot did not care that my own heart had just tried to quit on me. It had a route, and it ran the route.
It took the second one to wake me up.
Something got behind the wheel of my life that I could not have grabbed on my own.
This time the routine did not politely pull over. It got stopped cold. And once it was stopped, I had a choice I had never really had before, because for the first time in a long time I was actually awake in the driver's seat. The autopilot was never the problem, it turned out. I just had it pointed at the wrong place, and now I could point it somewhere else.
So that is what I started doing. Building a new one.
Same autopilot. Opposite direction.
Eventually what I discovered is that in the beginning there is no autopilot. There is no car quietly driving itself anywhere good. There is just me, standing at the door in the dark, and every part of me wanting to go back to bed. The old routine had thirty years of practice behind it. The new one had nothing. I was not a walker, I was a guy making himself walk, which is a completely different animal, and some mornings the whole victory was just getting my shoes on and getting out the door before I could talk myself out of it.
It did not feel good. It was cold more often than not, and quiet, and my body complained the whole way. Nobody was watching. There was no streak yet to protect, no number to keep alive, nothing to lose if I skipped a morning except whatever I was trying to turn into.
So I made deals with myself. Five minutes, I would say, just get outside for five minutes, and more often than not it turned into the whole thing once my feet were moving.
The trick was never the walk. It was the door.
It was getting outside before the part of me that wanted to stay put could finish making its case. I doubt I am the only one who has stood at a door in the dark like that.
Five minutes was the deal back then. Now I give myself a floor. A ten minute walk. Outside if the weather lets me, on the walking pad if it does not. Ten minutes, and the day counts. It sounds like nothing. It is supposed to. If the bar is a real workout, I will negotiate with it in the dark and I will win that argument every time.
Bad days are not the exception. There are more of them than there are good ones, and whatever I built had to survive them or it was not going to survive at all. The floor is not for the mornings I feel like walking. It is for the ones I don't.
We get severe thunderstorms here in Florida, the kind where walking outside is not an option. Those mornings I use the walking pad. There was one morning it stormed so hard the power kept cutting out. The pad is electric. When the power went, the pad went with it.
I walked around the house in circles for ten minutes at a time.
Then came a stretch, February to April of 2024, ninety days of going after 10,000 steps a day. Somewhere in there something flipped. I stopped being a guy who was trying to walk more. I became a walker. It finally stopped being a thing I had to talk myself into and became a thing I am.
The autopilot took over, and this time I liked where it was headed. The streak did not require more grit each day. It required less.
These days the car still drives itself in the morning. Early, before the sun is really up. My feet are on the floor and moving before the part of me that wants to stay in bed has even woken up to object. I am not deciding to walk. I am just walking. The body goes first and the mind catches up later, same as it always did. The only thing that changed is where it goes.
I stopped trying to beat the autopilot with willpower. I built a new one instead and pointed it somewhere better, and I let it do the driving. The same machinery that buried me is the machinery carrying me out now. One walk at a time.
The car still drives itself in the morning. It just doesn't go to the liquor store anymore. It goes wherever my feet are headed.