My bucket list is a blank!

Ever since the heavily panned movie, The Bucket List, came out, I notice people having adopted that usage into their lives and talking about the items in their "bucket list."  I haven't seen the movie, but from the reviews and commentaries, I recall that the list involved a whole lot of places and activities, which is what people also seem to list in real life--everything from, say, bungee jumping to going to Naples.  "Vedi Napoli, e poi muori" was what my seatmate on the train from Florence to Rome told me fifteen years ago.  And even wrote it down for me.

The Statesman Journal reports on a global art(y) project: The "Before I die" wall.  

The idea behind the global public art project was born in New Orleans when an artist named Candy Chang lost someone dear to her, according to the project website. In her grief, she struggled to maintain perspective. To provide herself with a daily reminder of what is truly important in life, she enlisted the help of friends and covered the side of an abandoned house with chalkboard paint. They stenciled the phrase, “Before I Die I want to ... ” over and over again in rows.
It was just an experiment, Chang says on the website, but the next day, the wall was entirely filled with tearful, heartfelt and funny responses. That original wall appeared in February 2011. Today, there are more than 70 walls across the world.

A noble idea, yes, to realize our own mortality and to, thus, gain a perspective on life and its priorities.

But, it seems that the responses to the blank following the prompt "Before I die I want to _______" seem to be like what are often found in people's bucket-lists: a whole lot of material goals.  "walk the Great Wall of China" on this "before I die" wall is perhaps no different from a bucket-list entry about wanting to travel to see firsthand the Grand Canyon.  

The paper does report a few non-material goals that people have expressed.  But, the entries suggest to me that most of the responses, if not all of them, didn't result from any serious reflection on what their highest priority in life might be.  Imagine this: there you are lying on your deathbed.  You think not having been to the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall will be your greatest regret ever?  That your life was incomplete because you didn't visit that one place?  Given that the final thoughts can be incoherent, like the Rosebud moment, let us advance that a tad to when we are not quite there, yet (though, there is always that probability of death striking us any second, like when I am blogging!)  The question still remains: life feeling incomplete because of not having been to the Taj Mahal?

Are these listings products of our time when we seem to attach a great deal of weight to material satisfaction?    Isn't a feeling of a happy and complete and satisfied life something within us?  Further, even a bucket list of places could, in fact, reflect our own ignorance, right?  I mean, how would we know to include the names of places when we don't even know about them?  How would we know about foods to include in the bucket list when we are completely in the dark about a great number of foods that people eat on this planet?  Any list we draw will be bounded by that constraint of what we know.

I engage in wishful thinking as much as anybody else.  I have a great number of travel plans, yes.  It certainly will be exciting if I could travel to the moon and return, at least once, before I die.  To be able to take a look at this wonderful planet from the Moon and gain an appreciation for how irrelevant we are in this universe.  As Christopher Hitchens noted in the context of his death from cancer, there is no point even asking something like "why me?" because the cosmos wouldn't care to reply.

But, despite all my wishes, there is nothing in my bucket list.  None at all.  Years of reflecting on my mortality means that I am absolutely ready to kick the bucket anytime.

Well, as long as I die while wearing a clean pair of underwear :)

I am often reminded of John Updike's Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!"

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
"I thought he died a while ago."

For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.