We've been doing the Bucket List project at school this week. 100 things to do before you die.
Nice way to wrap things up. Or so I thought. You know, get my walking hormone pack to think about something besides bikinis, six-packs and beaches.
I thought I was making progress with them until someone asked me if "Sleep with Drake" was an appropriate goal.
I looked up quizically and squinted my eyes at her as if that would improve my hearing or change what she said and finally realized with some dismay that she was dead serious.
"Take a wild guess" I said dryly.
"Uh, no"?
"Good guess".
Wait a minute, I thought, Who's Drake?
So I asked her.
"Who's Drake"?
"A rapper", She replied casually.
That figures, I thought as I shrugged my shoulders and she crossed him off her list.
But apart from those kinds of responses and the predictable "win the lottery", (ie; I'm too lazy to think this through) as time went by, most kids began to take the list more seriously. And watching that happen was very cool.
100 things to do before you die.
It can be pretty daunting.
Once you hit about 30 things, it gets tougher unless your goal is to visit every city in the world and then all you have to do is get an Atlas and you're golden.
But that's cheating. (There's honor in writing the list).
Making a list however, becomes more manageable if you break it up into the seven categories I've mentioned before based on Canfield's Principles of Success;
personal relationships, finances, career, health and fitness, self-improvement, relationships, and contribution to society.
And the idea is not to overwhelm yourself with so many damn goals at once that suddenly you feel like you won't do any of them.
That would be like a writer giving themselves a deadline of 2000 words a day (ahem) knowing the pressure to do so would probably force them to clean their bathroon instead so they could avoid it entirely.
And we've all been there.
A good bucket list takes a long time to make. Not just one afternoon, or even one day. You have to stew on it. It has to simmer in the slow-cooker of your mind until all the flavors come together and the gravy starts to look like gravy instead of a cornucopia of veggies, meat and stock.
And what feels like individual pieces of an incomplete puzzle begins to come together and resemble a docket of your life.
And the things that excite you are the very things that begin to define who you are.
As you write the list, you get to know yourself. That's one of the subtler benefits.
You get to know what your priorities are, whether you're a risk-taker or more conservative, whether you choose security over freedom, whether you embrace a white picket fence or the gypsy within.
You start to feel the extent of your comfort zone or even the self-imposed boundaries of your existence.
And the list becomes an entity that grows into more specifics as your vision expands. And you expand with it because self-understanding is one of the keys to experiencing the richness of life and somewhere along the way, you figure that out.
Somewhere along the way, you become more specific about what you want.
You go from writing "I want to go to Europe" to:
"I want to say 10 'Hail Mary's' while kneeling in the first pew of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after first sipping an espresso in a neighborhood cafe".
But these things take time.
That's why these lists must be reviewed periodically. As you change so do the things on your list. Some things are crossed off because either you've done them, or they no longer serve you, or they just don't make sense anymore.
It's all about self-discovery.
But everybody's gotta start somewhere - even if that somewhere is, "Sleep with Drake".
In the words of Margaret Young:
You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
