It seems quite surprising that I’ve been writing this retirement blog for about 8 years and heading for 1,000 blogs and yet I’ve never written about the ubiquitous bucket list. I mean retirement and bucket list, bucket list and retirement, they just seem to go together.
Of course it’s possible I have written about this topic and just forgotten. Such things seem to happen with increasing frequency these days. But let’s assume I haven’t and that would cause me to ask – why not?
The answer that comes to mind is that I somehow disapprove of the concept. I think I’ve always had the idea that things that might appear on a person’s bucket list should have been accomplished way before we get to our retirement years. I wouldn’t say this was strictly the case for us but there is at least an element of truth in this explanation.
What prompted this retirement blog was, as is so often the case, an article in this Sunday’s just gone, Observer. The article is headed, Skydiving, the North Pole, mountain climbing … so what’s on your bucket list?
The article itself was sparked by the arrest of a terminally-ill man who had mooned a speed camera. The police sent 3 police cars to arrest him. Seems a bit over-kill to me but then maybe you had to be there. He said it was something he’d always wanted to do. It make me wonder how they had identified him. The mind boggles.
Along with this was the usual stuff about bucket lists like why do some people have them and what might be on them. I did once write a blog about raging against the dying of the light, so maybe that’s my explanation, if I had one.
As for the activities themselves the article suggested the usual suspects – flying to far-off places, the inevitable sky-diving and swimming with dolphins and the others quoted in the headline. There’s also, seeing an iceberg or the Northern Lights or, the more unachievable in my case, shooting my age in a round of golf (your score is the same as your age). I can’t say any of these examples appeal to me or as far as I know to Mrs Summerhouse although she occasionally gets a bit dreamy about the sky-diving. Hmm, you think you know a person.
Also quoted in the article were the thoughts of ‘journalist and self-improvement author’, Oliver Burkeman. He wrote a book entitled Four Thousand Hours. A snappy title designed to indicate the ‘shocking’ finiteness of our lives. He writes, ‘It’s only by accepting our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life’. I’m not sure what truly authentic means in this context but I can’t help but feel that the man has a point.
He goes on to say, or at least is quoted as having said, about bucket lists, ‘once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem’.
Again I think he has a point but it feels a bit over-stated for my taste. As the article says it’s quite hard to accept all the stuff you haven’t done when social media is now full of ‘billions’ of people sharing their special individual bucket-list type experiences. He also mentions the importance of ‘seeking novelty in the mundane’ which to me sounds like code for accepting your life as it is without buggering about with bucket lists. Again he may have a point.
There is in the article one last interesting question from a person who has left his job ‘to pursue an alternative quest for meaning.’ And in the case of this article the question is ‘whether it is more meaningful to witness extraordinary scenes or to leave a more permanent trace’.
This might relate to an area of getting on a bit about leaving a legacy as referenced by Stephen Covey and this I have written about. If this is a bucket-list activity then I think I’ve done a fair job here. I refer to leaving tangible – property, money and intangible but probably more important – love and guidance, for the children.
But as to the question, having somewhat ridiculed the concept of a bucket list, just supposing I did have one, then what would be on it? Is there anything in the extraordinary scenes / experiences category that I would scribble in to my diary?
Scraping the barrel of my imagination there might be – having a log cabin, or similar, built in Colorado or turning the vineyard into a more reliably commercial operation or, further down in the barrel, having a book about our vineyard experiences published by a ‘proper’ publisher or maybe even one about my retirement. We hope to get back to visit places we lived in Australia and New Zealand and there are train trips still to be taken (we’ve done 3 or 4 of the most famous train trips in the world). But in all honesty these are all rather prosaic and, I emphasise, not because they’re dull but because most of them are nearly achievable* –assuming I live long enough of course.
*That’s with the exception of the book publishing which is one of those items that remains beyond my control having published The Vineyard Years as an eBook and paperback through Amazon.