What’s on Your Bucket List?

A few years ago – okay, more than 30 – I left Edmonton for Calgary, lured by the liberal arts education promise of being taught how to live. As the reality fell short of that promise, I began keeping my own record of what I was eating and drinking outside the classroom of life, mapping this academically unaddressed terra incognita of being.

As my intellectual, creative, and spiritual development began not to unfold, I realized that there was a distinct and important lack in my new life.

I was not ever going to be offered the experience of spending an unadulterated amount of time in Spain quaffing cheap wine and engorging an inordinate amount of tapas.

At the end of last year, I was offered this small window of opportunity. So I got on a plane to Barcelona and meandered until I reached a tiny southern village near the sea.

During this, my ‘Solo Sojourn in Spain’ , I had people writing to me saying that “I was living their dream life”.

It quite took me aback.

First, I did not really think I was necessarily living “a dream life” – I was just living my life.

And secondly, if this is what they saw as their dream life, why weren’t they living it?

After all, if you wait, all that happens is you get older.

Like Picasso said, “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” 

It may be because our present social media culture inculcates, perpetuates and intensifies our Fear of Missing Out (tweet as FOMO).

Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in the movie, “The Bucket List”, have forever personified this perceived scarcity.

They had 18 items on their pad of yellow paper and crossed off each as they accomplished them.

Now it goes without saying that most of us aren’t billionaires like the fictional Edward Cole, but that shouldn’t necessarily stop us from checking off our own bucket list.

Well, maybe not the skydiving one.

1. Witness something truly majestic
2. Help a complete stranger for a common good
3. Laugh till I cry
4. Drive a Shelby Mustang
5. Kiss the most beautiful girl in the world
6. Get a tattoo
7. Skydiving
8. Visit Stonehenge
9. Spend a week at the Louvre
10. See Rome
11. Dinner at La Cherie d’Or
12. See the Pyramids
13. Get back in touch (previously “Hunt the big cat”)
14. Visit Taj Mahal, India
15. Hong Kong
16. Victoria Falls
17. Serengeti
18. Ride the Great Wall of China

Yes, the world is continually letting us know how much we are missing out on.

Once known as “keeping up with the Jones”, these social media timelines bombard us with a crushing sense of perpetual urgency, making the satisfaction of our mostly ordinary lives almost non-existent.

Many cannot leave their phone unattended for more than two minutes in the fear that – what? They will miss a recipe for cucumber popsicles, a play that has finished its run, or that someone has burned their pot roast?

I’d give up sarcasm, but that would leave interpretive dance as my only means of communicating.

Faced with photos of vacationing in a glass-bottomed villa in the Maldives, wondering where one can buy that down-filled jacket the everyone is wearing, and why our desk doesn’t look like a Pinterest board, we naturally feel sub-par.
Our minds run wild with comparisons. If we are always measuring ourselves against others who broadcast a more exciting life than we could ever imagine and our lovability by the number of “Likes”, how are we ever to be content with our lives?

And who exactly, gets to decide you are or are not, beautiful?

In our always-connected digital world, many of us have become accustomed to the idea that we are the architects of our days. We make our appointments and set our schedules, all the while kvetching that we are just too busy. Our overscheduled lives proclaim to the world and ourselves that we are super-indispensable. Gosh, we hardly have time to thank the barista for our morning coffee, never mind making time to share it with a friend.

We have books like, “25,000 Places to Pick Olives Before You Die”, people claiming the necessity of walking the five major routes of the Camino, running with the bulls in Pamplona, throwing ripe tomatoes at tourists in La Tomatina, or learning to dance the flamenco…

Gee, some of this sounds like fun.

I’ll be right back.

Okay, I’m back. Seems like I was a little late for some of them.

Now where was I?

Right. FOMO.

Now, there are five approaches to this.

One. To fall into its eudemonic Venus trap causing yourself immense agony, as you feel that somewhere else is where you should be, somebody else is who you need to be, and something else is what stimulating and beautiful people are doing – the ones who have exactly the life that should be yours.

Many people start this process with the disadvantage of having recently been at an Ikea store, itself an emotionally destabilizing experience filled with anxiety.

I mean most of us can barely work the toaster. Do you put the bread in first? Or do you push the lever down first? Like, what if you do it wrong?

Two. Understand that is it rampant to listen to the heart of one’s friends, learn to cope well with being alone, appreciate the consoling power of nature, and be able to talk with a eight-year-old child.

Consumerism and noise beleaguers us at our every turn. The art of stillness is harder and harder to attain, and for some, often terrifying. What adds fuel to the fire is the difficulty to ever be sufficiently alone in order to sort out our thoughts and feelings. We can, for example:

Let our thoughts merge with the grandeur and scale of an ocean.
Visit a graveyard that helps us remember the brevity of our lives.
Spend some time in a desert to realize that we are but a tiny element in something far larger.
Or look up to the stars.

One can miss out on extremely important things if one is rushing a little too intently searching to find excitement elsewhere.

First, we have to know what is missing in order to find it.

Is it an experience, a change of vocation, a new sofa?

All of our actions are tapping into the same central question: What do I want to do with my life right now – today? 

It is fine to be stirred and inspired by one another, but it’s another thing to compete and compare ourselves against these Photoshop expectations.

We need to value our unique and different abilities. We also need to be aware of our particular propensities, unlike the person who shows up with her famous casserole that is famous for all the wrong reasons.

It might sincerely be possible for someone to decide not to take the higher paying job, not to buy an expensive car, not to seek political office – and to do so not because they didn’t have a chance, but because – having surveyed the externalities involved – chose not to have them.They may have instead, with no loss of dignity, opt to become a little poorer and a little more obscure.

Everything has its price; the relevant issue is the value of the article and whether you are going to haggle over its price.

Think of your life as three buckets.

The first bucket is called Vitality, and it’s about the state of your mind and body.

The second is Connection; this one is about relationships.

The third, Contribution, is about how you contribute to the world.

The fuller your buckets, the better your life. When all simultaneously bubble over, life soars. That’s what we’re aiming for. But the flip side is also true. If any single bucket runs dry, you feel pain. If two go empty, a world of hurt awaits. If all three bottom out, you don’t have a life.