There’s a 2007 film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman called Bucket List.
I’d recommend seeing it for a couple different reasons. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, jerks a few tears, and in the end is plenty thought provoking. Not long after I originally saw it, I was diagnosed (in January 2008) with a rare form of cancer in the soft tissue of my breast. Reading everything I could on Phyllodes Tumor, I got to thinking long and hard about the quality and length of my life.
I started a bucket list during that time. I dug an unused binder out of the closet, designed and printed a cover and spine title page, and filled the binder with college ruled, 3-hole punched note paper. I printed, in big, bold, blue (black seemed too morbid), block letters, each of my (then) bucket list items at the top of a separate sheet of paper. I used a whole sheet of paper to more easily keep notes and record the progress of my journey to achieve each of the items. Additional sheets can easily be added as needed.
The worst case scenario (with my cancer) obviously didn’t happen. And my bucket list migrated to the bottom shelf of my bookcase. I rarely looked at it during the rest of my working career.
Now that I’m retired and writing this blog, I pulled out and dusted off that bucket list for last week’s post. The beginning of each new year is a good time to review and tweek it. In the retirement stage of life, a bucket lists helps refocus the additional time you have to spend, and serves to keep you motivated, excited, and active. It reminds you of purpose, something that can be sorely lacking in day-to-day retirement life.
Many of the items on my original bucket list were places to visit. As I reviewed them to write this post, I realize most of them don’t matter to me anymore. One thing I never, ever even thought to put on the list was to live near a beach. Yet here we are, and I am as happy as I’ve ever been with our physical location. Because I’m so content here, many of those places I thought I’d want to see “someday” are simply no longer important to me. I guess I was always trying to escape from a boring day-to-day existence.
One of the items on my original list is ridiculously expensive and totally impractical: owning a gyrocopter. If I’m honest, I put that on MY bucket list for Randy. Is that cheating? I’d love to be able to gift Randy with a gyrocopter, but I know I will (selfishly) put achievement of my list items before his flying machine every time I get to make a choice. Somebody please tell Randy he needs to put that gyrocopter on HIS bucket list if it’s that important to him. And if he ever makes a bucket list.
One of my most ambitious items (added to my list in 2013) was to make 100 prayer shawls. When I put it on the list, it seemed an audacious goal, but I’m amazingly close to achieving it. If you’re a regular reader of my blog you know I’m still knitting and crocheting shawls. If you know anyone who would be blessed by a prayer shawl, please pass their information on to me by using the Contact Form on the Home page of this website.
As of this morning, some of the things on my list that are still important to me are:
- Read a biography of each president, in order. (I’m looking for a bio of Rutherford B Hayes now.)
- Visit the Smithsonian Institute and not rush through it.
- Be an encouragement to others at every opportunity.
- Take a 2-week houseboat trip on Lake Powell.
- See truth revealed, justice done, and the America I grew up in restored.
I need to put an archive divider tab in my three-ring binder and take all those other no-longer-important items out of the active bucket list portion of the binder. Then I’ll add in the items that have become important to me recently, such as writing daily as I mentioned in last week’s post.
We had a conversation last evening at dinner about bucket lists. Our brother-in-law, David, mentioned a few things that were on his bucket list. My first questions to him were….do you have an actual bucket list? Have you written anything down? He admitted he hadn’t and also admitted that I was right in advising him to make sure that list is written down.
As you ponder your own bucket list, keep these things in mind.
- Anything is possible! After you commit to all the things you’d like to put on your list, you can sort through and prioritize them. Don’t not (notice the double negative which means to just DO it!) write it down if it seems impossible when you first think of it.
- Bucket lists aren’t just about doing things. What opportunities do you want to develop to be something different or more, or to radically change your situation or perspective?
- A bucket list can be a life guide no matter what stage of life you’re in. But to function as a life guide, treat it as a living, breathing document and make regular appointments with yourself to review and tweek it.
Sharon M. Weinstein, in her book B is for Balance, wrote, “People don’t realize that a bucket list is not just associated with dying; having a bucket list is actually a “way to live.” So true! Now get going on figuring out what matters most to you!
If you’re willing to share anything about your own bucket list or your journey to create one, please comment below.
P.S. I’ve had another Green Bay Packer Super Bowl appearance on my bucket list since 2010. I ripped out and threw away that page on Sunday. There’s nothing I can do about the Packers performance. That goal actually belongs on someone else’s bucket list. (I’m talking to you, Aaron Rodgers!)
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