What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

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Thoreau

Requisite Thoreau quote for post dealing with existential questions and/or bucket lists

When I saw today’s Finish the Sentence Friday prompt, “My bucket list includes….”, I sat back in shock.

I, a queen of list-making, did not have a bucket list!

I think part of the reason is the morbid nature of a bucket list. And I don’t like the phrase “kicking the bucket” or other ways we make light of a sad and profound event.

I do set yearly goals. I write them down in a special notebook. I even organize them into categories: Personal, Financial, Mind/Body, and Family/Mothering.

Generally these goals are very concrete and short-term. The books I want to read, the amount of money I plan to contribute to savings, how many times a week I want to exercise, or the family traditions, like game nights, that I want to establish.

In preparing this post, I looked back on my 2013 goals that I wrote in January. How exciting to see that “explore blog ideas” had come to a wonderful fruition! But the rest was pretty mundane.

Last week, I heard Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, speak at the BlogHer conference. And she asked us, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

To me, that is a bucket list. But since I don’t like that term, we’re just going to call it, “Things I Would Do If I Wasn’t Afraid.”

It’s such a daunting task! We have this one lifetime, this brief span in which we can contribute to the human story, which is an even briefer snippet of our time as part of the fabric of the universe. We have this lifetime to make our mark, to not live the life of “quiet desperation” that Henry David Thoreau decried.

Walt Whitman wrote, “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” What will be my verse?

{I totally want to watch Dead Poets’ Society right now.}

What do I want to contribute?

I want to raise kind, compassionate, and joyful children.

I want to inspire my students to learn, to be effective citizens, and to make our world better.

But these are things I do for others. What do I want to do for me?

In preparing this post, I also Googled researched “bucket lists” to find out the types of things people include on their lists. This one site I found extensive research revealed a “Top Twenty Ranking” of bucket list items. According to my complex mathematical analysis, 9 of the 20 items were what I categorized as risky physical adventures, a.k.a. things I would never do: go sky-diving, go parasailing, get a tattoo. Four included top travel destinations, like seeing the pyramids in Egypt. Three consisted of what I labeled standard life goals: fall in love, get married, buy a house. Two were still-risky but less life-threatening adventures: write a book, run a marathon. And one was random: send a message in a bottle. Seriously?

Only one, of the top twenty, fell into a category I labeled as service to others: donate blood.

I think our “bucket lists,” our “Things I would do if I wasn’t afraid” lists are really about our big, personal dreams. Things we want to do for ourselves.

And maybe that is why we are afraid of them. They seem selfish and indulgent. It’s hard to find, and feel like we deserve, the time to focus on ourselves, when we have so many other people who depend on us.

I’ve written before that we need to recognize that self-care is not selfish. We cannot give to others when we are depleted. As much as we may fear declaring what we want do for ourselves, it’s important.

To make this even more complex and meta, one of the things I am really afraid to do is to publish my goals and dreams on the World-Wide-Web-which-never-gets-deleted-and-everything-is-there-for-eternity.

I read this post a few days ago in which Jenna Hatfield shared the same worry ~ how scary it is to actually write it down, as Sandberg encouraged us to do. Then people will know if we’ve failed. They’ll know if we don’t even try. But maybe that’s the accountability we sometimes need.

So, with no further ado, here is my “Things I Would Do If I Wasn’t Afraid.” The things I want to do for me. I want to:

  1. Write and publish a book. This has been a lifelong dream.
  2. Travel! I want to visit Turkey and Greece. I want to travel outside of “western civilization” and my own comfort zone. I would love to see India someday.
  3. Attend a meditation retreat. Maybe even a silent one.
  4. Travel abroad … by myself. I have never done this. But I think it would be incredible.
  5. Earn a doctoral degree. I don’t even know what discipline it would be in. But that would be amazing.

{Looking at this list, left-brain me is already thinking how to combine #2, #3, and #4 into a solo adventure to India for a meditation retreat! Is it wrong to multi-task on a meditation retreat? And then maybe I could write a book about it? Or my doctoral dissertation, to get all 5? … But hasn’t that been done already? Maybe I’ll publish Eat Meditate Write?}

Ultimately, these lists are about our deep human longing to live deliberately, and, as Thoreau wrote, “to suck the marrow out of life,” to not “go to the grave with the song still in [us].”

Let’s find that verse. Carpe Diem.

*****

What’s on your list? What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

This post is part of the Finish The Sentence Friday linkup. Click here to conduct your own research about the items on people’s “bucket lists.”

Sarah Rudell Beach
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