In 2011, (around the same time I started writing this blog, actually) I got myself a 3DS. I was very impressed by many of its features – in particular the fact that it had a built in pedometer. I soon discovered that 10,000 was a healthy number of steps to get in a day and so ever since I’ve tried to get that number of steps each and every day.
As of today, my 3DS has recorded 25 million steps as I’ve carried it around these last seven years and those are some pretty significant steps – in terms of quality, not just quantity. Those are the steps I took when walked into my school to get my A Level results. These are the steps I took on my first day of university – these are the steps I took on my last day of university. These are the steps I took on my first visits to: Ipswich, Wolverhampton, Plymouth, Yeovil, Birmingham, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Felixstowe and Oxford. These were my first steps into a Nando’s – my first steps onto an aeroplane. The steps I’ve taken around the offices of eight different jobs. The steps that took me to home to seven different beds. They’re the steps I took on a ten mile sponsored walk and the steps I’ve taken pacing back and forth at the bus stop. These are the steps which walked me through what have perhaps been the most emotionally significant years of my life.
Who knows where my next 25 million steps will take me? I really couldn’t answer that, but I can’t wait to find out. Between taking my first step and twenty-fifth millionth step, not much has remained constant – people have come and gone, I’ve started and left university, I’ve started new jobs and left them. I as a person have evolved and my priorities and needs are very different to those of my 2011 self. But I have always had my 3DS (even if it’s actually two different systems, with the memory transferred from one to the other in 2015) and I hope it will still be there when I take the fifty millionth step in what I presume will be 2025.
