Creating a bucket list

– Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. –John Lennon

Ain’t that the truth? We get so caught up in working, shopping, eating, trying to catch up with family and friends that big picture thinking about our lives often gets left to the summer when we get some down time. So now’s the perfect time to ask have you got a Bucket List? Have you vaguely thought about dusting off those long-held dreams and writing one?

If we ourselves don’t take our hopes and dreams seriously, who else can?

Although there’s something a little confrontational about writing down the things you hope and dream of doing on a bit of paper before you hit your ‘Use By Date’, the real focus of a bucket list is on how you live versus how you want to live, about living life to the max, fulfilling your potential, giving the things you really want to try a go. It’s about aiming for the stars and for this reason, making one comes highly recommended. While nobody likes to think about dying, the reality is we all die, but not all of us fully enjoy our allotted number of years. It’s the old glass half-full trick at work again.

A Bucket List is not meant to be a ‘Must Do’ list that you use to club yourself over the head with if things remain undone or unachievable – like reconciling with an estranged sister or brother, daughter or son or a race against time. It’s meant to be a tool to enable you to realise some big dreams and try and more thoroughly savour your experience of life while you have it and make the positive difference you aspire to in the lives of others.

Creating your own Bucket List takes approximately 30 minutes – less time than it sometimes takes to do the washing or make a meal. There are a heap of tools and websites to ensure your list is a meaningful one for you rather than a long list of aspirational things that you have no intention of ever achieving.

There are a million examples of lists and how to write them on the web. Mine includes going to see the Moeraki Boulders, walking one of New Zealand’s Great Tracks, taking one of the world’s great train trips, The TranzAlpine from Christchurch to Greymouth and taking the family to Ninety Mile Beach. What New Zealand or international destinations would you put on your list? What do you want to see? Who do you want to meet? What do you want to say to someone special?