Everyday Musings > Life's checklist

As I sit on my many cubby-holed wooden writing table, two books stare out at me, ’98 things a woman should do in her lifetime’ and ‘101 things to do before you die’.

The first is a gift from Krish and the second was something Sue and I bought together promising to fill it up soon. The lists in it are interesting and things that one would love to do, some bizarre but adventurous, some simple and emotional. I've ticked on many and will probably do much more, but this morning, looking at the books, I wondered. Why do we make bucket lists?

What are our bucket lists all about? Unfulfilled wishes, desires, wants, goals, and expectations. Things that we wish to achieve, that we believe will make us the person we want to be, that we think will be the purpose of our lives. Our collected credits before we leave Earth.

Human Beings are mortal, and the clock starts ticking from the time we’re born. It’s a reverse countdown and the only thing sure in our destiny is the fact that we will die. There is no set way to life, no rules, no guidelines, nothing. We just plop out, cry, blink and start breathing.

To make it easier for to live this journey from birth to death, Human Beings created structures of living, and earned credits for each level - playschool, school, college, work, dating, marriage, children, retirement etc. As life went by, we exchanged our credits for wants, desires and goals. The must do, should do, have to do, really want to do bucket lists.

In the Landmark Forum, they said ‘Life is empty and meaningless and it is empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless.’ Like walking into an empty room for no reason at all apart from the reasons that your mind will find or create to explain why you are there. The room by itself is real but inert. It doesn’t goad you to do anything; it’s just a container for you to breed your thoughts and actions in.

But what does this mean for us? Do we stop making bucket lists? Are last wishes or dreams futile? Are achievements unnecessary? I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that the fact that life was empty and meaningless was such a liberating, happy thought. It meant I needed to earn no credits. It meant that the bucket list I made had no purpose other than beng a list. ‘I want to travel the world’ meant ‘I want to travel the world’ and nothing else. And that freed me from searching for my destiny, or what plans God had for my life. It meant my bucket list would not matter in the big scheme of things. That there was no big scheme of things. That life just is.

I used to collect bottle caps when I was a kid. If you collected enough of them, you could exchange them for goodies. Maybe some of us make bucket lists to cash them in for a space in the memories of those who live on after us. And thus remain immortal. And maybe some of us make lists so that we can give meaning to life and thus triumph over it's meaninglessness.