Dreaming of what’s next

Until this week, I have never written a formal bucket list. Things would bounce around in my mind through the years and if I did them I would mentally tick them off. Skydiving. Check. Zip line over a rainforest. Check. See the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Check. I even got to see a parade for a dead member of the royal family. That was not on my list but we happened to be in London when Queen Elizabeth’s mother died in 2002.

I am working through the exercises outlined in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, currently on week two. One weekly task is to go on an artist’s date and sometimes I fear I’m not very creative at all because I was at a loss to create a list for myself and googled “Artist’s Date” for some ideas and suggestions. Creating a bucket list was on this list and I decided it was time to put it all down in writing – what I’d done and what I still wanted to do.

It’s fun to dream. I like to keep it realistic but also strive for things that are going to be a stretch for me to complete. If they’re easy to cross off, they might be best suited for a to-do list and not a bucket list. So far I’ve come up with 26 items and about half of them have been completed, although there is a stirring in my heart to revisit a few of them again. The aforementioned trip to England was probably the biggest item on my list before I got started on any of it. I dreamed about it from the time I saw Princess Diana marry Prince Charles during the summer of 1981 when I was beginning to bloom into my teenage romantic self.

A big one I added to my list is I’d like to live in another country for at least a month. By myself. It’s great to visit places but I really want to be a local somewhere completely foreign to me and to experience it authentically. My husband and son also have a major bucket item coming up the summer of 2021 and that might be the time to make mine happen too. They are going to be walking the Camino de Santiago (this is absolutely not on my list) and will be away for 5-6 weeks. Can I make it happen? If I write it down, it just might come to pass.

What’s on your bucket list?

MC