On Your 'Bucket List'

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” ~George Bernard Shaw

This summer, as an 80th birthday present, my husband took a 45 minute flight on a B-25 bomber. He was very excited about the prospect on the weeks leading up to the flight but as he told people about it, he was asked on more the one occasion if it was on his bucket list. When he said, ‘No’, the person posing the question seemed at loss for what to say next. So they would end up saying something like, ‘Well you’ll enjoy it anyway’ or just looking a little confused. But as an onlooker I could almost heard them saying [to themselves] ‘If it’s not on his bucket list, then why is he so excited?’

Do you have bucket list? I don’t. Up front, I must admit that I have never seen the need, or had the desire, to have one. Indeed if I had put one together, ten or twenty or even 12 months ago, it would be useless today except in marking what was important to me AT THAT TIME. And isn’t that really what the problem is with a bucket list? As one grows and matures, and one’s life changes in focus, so do our dreams of what we would like to experience next. Creating oneself means always looking for something new to think, to see or to experience.

The writer of Mathew says basically the same thing in chapter 6, the first half of verse 34 “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow…” [MSG] But our society seems bent on ignoring just that. And the popularity of bucket lists are a very good example of that. We focus on what we will do in the future that will make us happy, and fulfil our dreams, what will give us that feeling of satisfaction, of having experienced it all. While we are doing this, we are missing out on what is actually happening at this very place and time. These are things that will never be repeated, opportunities that will never come again.

With the current surge in meditation, interest in being actively present in each moment has grown. And so what is on my bucket list, are those things that I want to do, and can do, RIGHT NOW: things like having coffee with a friend, taking the time to sit and read a book ‘for pure pleasure and nothing else’, spending all the time I can with those people who mean the most to me. All of these things are on my ‘bucket list’, but that bucket list is for this day, this minute, this second.

As Harriet Beecher Stowe said some 200 years ago “The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.”

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