Bucketing the Bucket List

I’ve been obsessed with Mongolia for a while now, just the scope and openness , the immeasurable expanse of grass and hills rolling indefinitely into the horizon until it bleeds into the sky. Sure, I liked Genghis Khan as much as the next kid growing up thinking about swords and glory which were, contrary to popular belief, hard to come by in suburban Ohio. Learning later in life about how not nice of a guy he was soured me a smidgen, but not enough to get over the immensity and un-interruptibility of the Steppe.

Then I realised, oh wait, maybe what I have to see before I die isn’t actually Mongolia, but the Steppe, this massive swath of Earth sweeping from Poland to China in which Mongolia sits. Also, I’m hedging, but why limit myself right? I need to make this, whatever it may be, happen.

A bucket list always sounds like a good idea and something you definitely should have. What other way to address mortality right? Yes, of course, a list! A list that will enforce all that productivity that I as a mere fallible human being do not have. It will do that by reminding me in as blunt of terms as possible, that I will die sooner than I think and I need to start accomplishing things lest I lay there on my death bed wallowing in regret and misery thinking about a life not well spent. The idea is that this list of far-reaching, life-changing and typically wildly unrealistic achievements, will be the compass of your life to avoid such regret.

I even at one point had “Learn to play drums” on the list. To try to make myself think that it was more achievable, I only wanted to learn to play four songs, which were Slayer “Raining Blood,” Assück “Blight of Element” for sure, and there might have been one by Fugazi and Buddy Rich, not sure. But it doesn’t matter because none of that was going to happen. Especially not Assück or Buddy Rich. Of course the songs were insanely hard for most drummers, but these songs are what I loved about drums. So yeah, before I die.

I maintained the list for while. Then I deleted it. That’s it. Just deleted it. Deleted all the places I would have needed to go and thing I would need to do before I die. The list chock full of half ridiculous and often ill inspired aspirations, was gone. What was supposed to happen way more was to worry about today instead of trying to check things off of a list of moving target. That is because the bucket list changes. It’s not constant. It changes just like you do, so maybe you should worry about the more constant thing, which is today.