Call it a bucket list, make it a life list
Do you have a bucket list? Do you know the origins of that term, bucket list?!? (If you did, you might stop using it, more on that in a minute.)
A bucket list contains the goals and experiences people hope to achieve in their life. So why don’t we call it a life list?
Maybe because “life” just doesn’t have urgency like “death” and we certainly wouldn’t call it a death list because that’s too close to death wish but mainly because we avoid the D word at all costs. We don’t *ie, we pass away or leave this world or meet our maker or go to our eternal rest or bite the dust or croak or kick the bucket.
Bingo, Bucket List, plus it’s fun to say and a bucket is smartly contained, conveying ease and greater achievability.
I have started calling my bucket list a life list. With metastatic breast cancer, my life has urgency built-in. I’m not giving up on the phrase bucket list though, as it’s instantly recognized and understood. Call it whatever you want, just make it a commitment to determine what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.
How “bucket” became synonymous with death
Bucket list borrows from the phrase “kick the bucket,” a euphemism for dying, which has two origin stories:
- The French word buquet describes a beam that was used by butchers in the 16th century to hang slaughtered pigs by their hooves. In the throes of death, it was common for the animals to actually kick the buquet.
- Suicide by hanging, in which the person stands on an inverted bucket and then must kick it away to tighten the noose and die.
Gruesome, no? Though now both “kick the bucket” and “bucket list” have evolved over time from something macabre to something more pleasant, or at least less unpleasant.
What’s wrong with the expression “bucket” list?
A bucket list tends to be solely about exciting happenings that are mostly one-and-done events. An entire movie, The Bucket List, is based on this premise, featuring Morgan Freeman as an average Joe and Jack Nicholson as a billionaire, brought together by a shared terminal lung cancer diagnosis.
The Bucket List movie was panned by Roger Ebert, the father of all film critics, who himself had thyroid cancer. The movie was released a year after he had surgery to remove a section of his lower jaw, which must have inspired Ebert’s summary of his critique:
Not to mention that not many people with a terminal diagnosis have a billionaire magically appear at the side of their hospice or hospital bed. That said, it’s a movie featuring acting greats Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, with wisdom at the heart of the creative license it took to deal with the topic of mortality.
Cancer and bucket lists
Cancer is the disease most often associated with bucket lists. Perhaps because a person can live for months and increasingly years after receiving even a terminal cancer diagnosis, and being told you don’t have long to live is the ultimate deadline and motivation to make the most of it.
Yet many people who get a cancer diagnosis—especially if it’s an advanced, terminal, or vexing form of this complex disease—will find that cancer itself is a major obstacle to achieving the items on their list, as Ebert said so eloquently in his critique. Cancer depletes the host it chooses in every way—emotionally, physically, financially—often leaving it in poor condition to attack a list of most anything one might want to do.
Turning a bucket list into a life list
A life list is more meaningful and encompassing than a typical bucket list. It should answer questions like:
- What does a meaningful life encompass for you?
- What are your personal and professional aspirations?
- How can you make the ordinary every day more special?
And the overarching question we all need to answer: What do you plan to do with the one life you have?
Remarkable life list story from a birder with melanoma
The birding community uses the phrase “life list” as a cumulative record of all the species sighted and identified by an individual birder. The person whose bird life list is the most extensive in the world—nearly 8500 species—also had cancer.
After learning in 1981 that she had melanoma and being told she had less than a year to live, birder Phoebe Snetsinger decided to spend whatever remaining time she had on this planet traveling around it in search of birds. Her time ended up being much longer than a year. After the prognosis of less than a year, she spent eighteen years crisscrossing the globe on an epic birdwatching mission.
Phoebe Snetsinger died in 1999 in Madagascar.
Cause of death: vehicle accident.
Snetsinger’s story is profiled in a book titled Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds.
Every life list is personal and unique
No matter how you create it or what you call it, your life list should be about you and your personal desires, not about expectations from society or culture or family or Instagram or anything else.
- You don’t have to please anyone but yourself and a very close loved one or two.
- Include some stretches that push your comfort zone. Remember, as far as any of us know for certain, we indeed have only one life.
- You most certainly should not feel bad or “less than” if your list doesn’t include skydiving or climbing a big mountain or crisscrossing the globe in search of birds. Maybe you just want to make the world a better place for one child or spend as much time as possible in your garden.
- Review it regularly and update as your needs and wants and perspectives change.
- Unlike other lists, as you cross items off this one, add more!
Life list resources and inspiration
Many websites and books are dedicated to the topic, though for search purposes, use the keyword “bucket list” because even though I don’t like it, it is the most common and popular. So if you would like some inspiration for your list, here are a few useful resources:
Websites
Bucket List Journey: Many ideas from Annette White, who describes herself as a “former anxiety-ridden hypochondriac who let fear completely control my life” which alone is inspiring.
Berkley Well-Being institute Bucket List Ideas: I love this page because it shows a variety of categories that can be represented in a life list, like career and simply having fun.
Books
5 Things You Need to do Before You Die: Condensed to only five because they are categories rather than specific things, making it an excellent starting point.
1000 Places to See Before You Die: This one is on my bookshelf and probably yours too if you were an adult in 2003, when it was published. (It has since been revised.) I can verify that there is something for everyone, far beyond the exceptional sights and wonders of the world.
Start creating your life list
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
The Summer Day