Maybe There's a Hole in my Bucket List

A friend of mine recently hiked to the top of a tall mountain.  One of those all-day hikes to a lodge at the top.  Dinner and breakfast at the lodge and then a box lunch for your hikes during the day or back down the mountain.  There are no roads to the lodge; only trails.  Food and all supplies are brought to the lodge by llamas.  There is no electricity in the spartan "cabins" and guests must bring their own towels and washcloths.  I'm not at all surprised that this is something my friend would do.  It's something I would like to do as well.  But I admit I was a bit surprised when she told me the hike was on her "bucket list."  My surprise was not that this hike was on the list, but that my friend had a bucket list at all.

You see...I've never had a bucket list.  It never occurred to me that I should have one, even after the successful movie was made.  As I have talked with other friends, I find that many of them do indeed have bucket lists and delightfully cross off the events one-by-one.  Now that I've become more aware of bucket lists, I find them often in sidebars of blogs.  Click on the icons and you can read their bucket lists.

Bucket is not my bucket.  It's from Wikipedia.  My mop bucket is far more attractive.

Should the lack of a bucket list concern me?  Or the fact that I have no desire to develop one?  Does this mean my life is stagnant and I have nothing more to look forward to?

As I looked more and more into the issue, I have found dozens of Websites about bucket lists.  Perhaps the most extensive one is this one.  On many of these sites, you can read the bucket lists of other people and even follow them as they cross off the items.  You can "join" some of the sites and publish your own list and chart your progress.  The sites will even help you create a bucket list.  Excuse me, but isn't there a little bit of a problem if you can't create your own list of things you want to do?

Do I have goals in life?  Yes, I do.  Are there places I want to visit?  Yes there are.  But none of them are so important that I feel compelled to do them before I die.  I can die just as easily without those experiences.  In short, is there anything I can think of that would come to my mind in my last hours on earth to which I would say, "Gee, if I'd only done (insert item from bucket list)."  I simply cannot come up with a single thing.

I should provide a disclaimer that I have never been a keeper of lists.  When I was working, my life was consumed with lists and I couldn't have survived without them.  Now that I'm retired I manage to maintain a grocery list, and I do write appointments on a calendar, but I don't have any other lists.  Not even a bird list.  But I still know if a bird is a "lifer" because I know I've never seen it before.  My husband, on the other had, keeps a regular office desk "day-at-a-glance" calendar.  He tucks notes on his dresser and reminders on his bathroom mirror.  But even he does not have a bucket list.

Perhaps it's because we are physically and financially able to do most everything we really want to do.  And we do make plans.  One of our plans is to drive the entire length of the Blue Ridge Parkway, but it's not sufficiently important for a bucket list.

I think perhaps I have taken the bucket list further than it was meant to go.  Perhaps it's more of a "want-to-do-sometime" list than "things I want to do before I kick the bucket."  So...do YOU have a bucket list?  If so, is it ranked from most to least important?  Do you share it with other people?  And most important of all...Do I need to worry because I don't have one?