Why you sHOULD have a bucket list

      I can’t say I’ve ever sat down to scribble out a “bucket list” per se. 

      Yet somewhere in my head is a jumble (jumbles increasingly are us) of things I’ve never managed to do that I would hope to do previous to, well, being dead—the bucket kicked, doing being done.

      I’ll begin by getting a couple of things straight: No jumping out of airplanes (like Bush senior). No climbing anything higher than Bear Mountain. No wild, drunken anythings.

      But travel—more travel!  But challenges! (Though not too challenging challenges.)

      I would, for example, “like to spend some time in Mozambique,” where, hear tell, “the sunny skies are aqua blue.” With maybe a side trip to Madagascar, which apparently has some unique animal species.

      I’ve been to a lot of places. Not enough. And I have never seen Victoria Falls, which, I now note, is sort of on the way from Mozambique to Madagascar. Or maybe it should be glaciers in Greenland, which is a heck of a lot closer?

      And not just travel. I have never ridden my bike across the new Tappan Zee (“Governor Mario M. Cuomo”) Bridge. I could manage that—even round-trip. More ambitiously, I’ve always wanted to kayak down the Hudson from Bear Mountain, maybe all the way to Manhattan. Though I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for such an adventure. And it sounds more difficult than riding across a bridge, although a whole lot less scary than parachuting.

      Is the idea, the whole bucket-list concept—simply, cravenly, showoffy—to check off places and challenges? Petra, done.

      Yeah, maybe that is the idea—as embarrassing as that sounds. In the course of my short life, as a not-gonna-jump-out-of-an-airplane kind of guy, I want, nevertheless, to have done a fair number of other things. So: maybe Greenland. What’s wrong with that?

      And there are other motivations for quasi-bucket listing:

1.     I’ve never been good at imagining what places will look like. But if someone says something about Petra, I have, thanks to a wife-insisted-upon visit there a decade ago, a quite-spectacular image of Petra I can call up in my head. And next time I’m driving across the Tappan Zee, I would have that (hopefully pleasant) memory of bike riding over the Hudson. Doing this stuff helps me fill in a picture of the world.

2.     I’ve always felt kinda confined on this planet. The initial steps toward escaping earth were taken in our lifetimes—although I wasn’t invited to participate. (It was more for jump-out-of-airplanes types.) I could imagine excursions beyond the Earth becoming more common (and safe) for our progenies’ progenies’ progenies. But in the meanwhile, I figure I should explore my cage: Earth’s countries, continents, bridges, rivers—as many corners of this confining planet as I can get to, while still doing lots of babysitting for the grandkids and watching Knick games.

3.     The value of MacGuffins. That’s the term used for otherwise insignificant things in literature or film—the Maltese falcon, was an example—that serve to move the plot along. And a bucket list can serve as a MacGuffin list—moving the plot of our lives along.

Those intriguing lines about Mozambique are from a Bob Dylan song, which long ago stuck in my head. A silly reason to go to Mozambique (or Juárez)? Of course. Except we need reasons of some sort in our lives—silly, often-artificial, vaguely inspiring reasons: MacGuffins, reasons to get off our duffs, out of the house and, maybe, even as far as Mozambique.

Indeed, maybe we particularly need reasons at the back end of life: when the mate-finding, the career-cobbling, the kid-tending are behind us and the only siren otherwise seducing us is this morning’s Times’ Spelling Bee.

There is a nice town on the other side of the Tappan Zee Bridge: Nyack. Riding the bridge will get me back there. Who knows what adventures might befall me while kayaking down the Hudson? We need—at least I need—to have been befallen by occasional adventures.

      Relaxing is sweet, no doubt: that cup of coffee on your comfy couch in the AM. But doing is, given the increasing proximity of death, better. Having in mind, or on paper or on your phone, a list, or jumble, of places to go or undertakings to undertake is just a way to encourage us to do more doing. A bucket list can further the chance that we, so to speak, do do.

      Is life some sort of game in which the goal is to have done lots of interesting things?

      Well, relationships with people are no doubt important. But that is one way of looking at it.