Empty the Bucket List

I’m 63 and in OK shape. Not great, but not horrible. I have a little bit of a gut that grew over the holidays. I can still play tennis and ride a bike, hiking is still cool. My friend Ted is a year or two older and he just ran a half marathon to celebrate his 65th birthday. Obviously he is a ridiculous show off and I won’t speak of him again, but our sixties clearly still have possibilities for many of us to be active and enjoy some things that may not be possible in a mere ten or fifteen years.

I am all for doing what you can to keep yourself going as you age, but no matter what you do, you WILL age. You can slow the process and remain physically viable longer with effort and diet, but in the end no one gets out alive.

So that brings up the idea of the bucket list. You know, the list of things you want to do or achieve before you kick the bucket. Did you know that refers to kicking the bucket out from under yourself for a self-inflicted hanging? Just a jaunty little aside. Anyway, it may include activities you want to do, like sky diving or scuba diving or some other kind of diving. It may have places in it you want to visit that you have never found the time to explore. Maybe you want to seek out people from your past and tell them what they meant to you. It may include finishing something left undone.

Often times it may include things that are complete flights of fancy, things that you know you will not be able to get to in the time you have left. That’s OK, they’re fun and it’s harmless to fantasize as long as you have the awareness of what they are.

But the other stuff is different. These are things that with planning, effort and single mindedness you could do, you could accomplish if they are actually important to you. Some of them have a time limit on them as they may require a physical component that you may not retain forever. Some may require resources that are limited, or time that you don’t have, but may find later through retirement. Some may need to be adapted as new realities make their original conception impossible. There are challenges to all of them or they wouldn’t have made it to the list in the first place. You would have already accomplished them.

A bucket list is fine, but it isn’t intended to be like the Sears catalog was at Christmastime when we were kids. The Wish Book. A place to go to dream and take mental ownership of things we would never have. A place to dream without expectation of fulfillment.

A bucket list needs to be turned into a “to do” list.

A little over a year ago it occurred to me that I had always wanted to mountain bike. Riding a bike on the street was great, but there was something about the idea of being able to conquer terrain that was challenging and inhospitable on a machine powered by just my body and my will. Maybe taking jumps or navigating drops that a normal person would look at and see as insurmountable, learning the skills that would make that a real possibility, something I could navigate while enjoying the smell and the dappled light filtering through the canopy of an autumn wood.

So I bought a bike.

My adopted home of Richmond, VA has an amazing number of resources to make my off road fantasy come true. Belle Isle is but one, and it has a great hodge-podge of trails carving the spit of land surrounded by the James River into a hundred pieces, and it has a bicycle skill park with lots of obstacles, jumps, ramps and tracks to push the rider to higher and higher levels of achievement. It was my first stop after my purchase and I couldn’t wait to challenge myself. This was on my list, and I was about to check it off!

It didn’t go exactly as planned. My expectations quickly met the reality of my limitations, and I returned home bloody though thankfully, and miraculously, unbroken. I took some significant spills that could have been far greater disasters than they turned out to be, but they were bad enough and I felt the residual effects for the better part of two weeks.

I didn’t sell the bike. I went back.

I hurt myself again.

Some of this was just biting off more than I could chew on the very first few bites. That is how I have learned many things in my life, just simply diving into the deep end and figuring it out from there. But lacking the skills required had consequences in this case, real danger being part of the trade-off for the thrills I imagined awaited me. Having avoided a hospital-level event didn’t obscure how close to that I had come, and I began to re-evaluate what I was really trying to achieve. Some of the skill challenges I had attempted were great fun and had an acceptable amount of risk, but others were asking for trouble. I had to come to terms with some of that and reassess what was going to be possible.

When I get on my bike now I don’t have the same goals I did when I got it, but I found out what was important about what I could do. I could still enjoy the woods under my own power, still take on most of the challenges I had anticipated while applying the wisdom to know the ones I should avoid. I thought I was still capable of what I could do as a kid, and though I am capable of more than I’m willing to take on right now, there is still growth possible, I can get an incredible amount of joy from the skills I do have. I don’t ride in the street, I ride in places that are lovely and safe from other vehicles. I can challenge myself with the obstacles that present themselves or walk around the ones I can’t handle and all of that is something that I likely won’t be able to do forever, so they are a now thing. A “to do” thing. I may have left all this in my bucket list longer than I should have, but moving it to the “to do” list has been a victory.

Bucket lists are enormously useful. They are an exercise in examining our priorities, of discovering the things that really matter to us. I think it would be an excellent practice for kids to do as part of their curriculum, and an extraordinary record of our growth as people if we maintained the habit as an annual ritual. Equally fascinating would be a recap of what was accomplished from that list every year, what got continued and what was determined to be ill advised or not important.

Mine today is vastly different from what I might have cobbled together thirty years ago. They would largely be documentation of two different people with some underlying familiarity.

But the bucket list is just a starting point. If it has no influence on action there was no point in starting it in the first place. There is an urgency to putting it into action, even more so as we get older, making it a “to do” list that you work on today.

What can you put into action? What step can you take that brings you a little closer to reducing the bucket list and creating memories?

This is at the core of getting progressively older. We don’t have forever, we have now. Do what you can, while you can, as well as you can.

That will be more than enough.