CREATING A BUCKET LIST

When I returned home I talked with my mother-in-law who is 97 years young who jovially complained that she feels she is getting old.

Then I heard the news that a dear friend of my daughter’s has just been diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer at the age of 24. He’s a very gentle, highly intelligent young man who decided to dedicate his life to medicine and found himself the wrong side of the odds when it came to his own diagnosis. Nevertheless he too remains positive and with all the love and positive energy we can send him will pull through.

All this brought back to me the reminder that life hangs by a mere thread and we step into the unknowable every single second of our life. We never know when disaster is going to strike or when our life is going to be snatched from our hands, or indeed when our life is going to take a further upturn! This makes it all the more important to live every day to the very best of our ability, making sure we create or take every possible opportunity to make life good!

So should the creation of a personal Bucket List – the things we are drawn to doing, being or becoming before we die – be something none of us should live without? We could then work consistently at fulfilling those dreams. Hmm ‘dreams’ – this is something I discussed with my long-standing friend over the weekend. She was feeling that dreams are no longer within her gift. I reminded her of our interpretation of ‘dreams’ – they’ve got to be doable, but with some stretch required. We are not talking fantasy here. That’s why we need to let our dreams shift and morph as we journey along life. If we didn’t we’d only start to fill our heads and hearts full of bitterness and regret. “Hmm, I’ve always wanted to go to Prague”, she mused. “Perhaps I could take a long weekend.” The dream was starting to become real for her.

Whether we are suffering from illness or not, aging is an unstoppable tide. We have the choice to succumb, regret what we have missed out on or – more positively – start from where we are. It’s amazing what dreams are still available to us!

If you don’t have one, why not start your own Bucket List today?