The Bucket List

This is the year of the BIG birthday [50] and like countless others before me I’ve started thinking about how I’ve spent my life. The bigger question is what to do with the rest of it. I’ve raised my children, I’m happily married, my assent up the corporate ladder has slowed (and not because of bad knees), and hopefully I’ve made a difference in some small way. I’ve decided that I will live to the middle of the century … 2050; that’s 42 more years so I better have something to do. First, because I am not independently wealthy, I have to keep working and my current employer is a good a place to be as any. I like my job, I like the people I work with, and for the most part the climate in southern United States is ok. I will work until working gets in the way of my other plans. Second, I want to travel and have adventures. I don’t want to look back on my life when I am 92 and say to myself “Why didn’t I take that train trip across Canada or why didn't I go skydiving”. If an opportunity presents itself I will be there. I recently missed an opportunity to sing karaoke. No big deal right? Now, for some strange reason I am obsessed with the idea and practice daily in my car. Go figure. If I had just done it when the opportunity presented itself I wouldn’t be in this situation. That's when I made the decision that if something won’t kill me, I need to go for it. In the movie "The Bucket List" with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, Morgan's character is dying from terminal cancer. He creates his bucket list ... a list of things he wants to do before he “kicks the bucket”. Well, I did this too, shortly after my last birthday, but I didn’t call it a bucket list. It was just a list of [50] things that I wanted to do before I reached [50]. Half way through the year I came to the conclusion that not even Superwoman could complete the list in 12 short months. But the point is, I’ve got the list and slowly but surely I’m ticking items off of it. And I keep adding to it. Chances are I will never do everything on “the list” but the point of the exercise is to live life to the fullest. Life lists are not just for adults. I recently read an article about a 17 year old girl, Liz Evett, who is working on completing her bucket list. She is a cancer patient and her leukemia is not responding to chemo therapy. She knows her days are numbered, but she is making the most of them. One of the items on her list is to see the sunrise, a lofty goal for a teenager :-) but something she freely admits, that most of us take for granted. And something I hope she accomplishes. And third, I am going to stop wishing my life away. I caught myself wishing for the end of the day; wishing it was Friday; or wishing I didn’t have to get up for work the next morning. No more. I realized that tomorrow will get here soon enough without any help from me. So if you are reading this, I would like to say to you: Keep working until something better comes along. You might need the money for something exciting. Start your life list or bucket list or whatever you want to call it. The list, like life itself is not static and needs to be updated occasionally. Keep life exciting. You deserve it. Stop wishing your life away. Live each day to the fullest.