Kicking the "Bucket List"

Riding on the commuter ferry that I take home from work in a relatively severe thunder storm recently, I progressed through my standard worst-case-scenario thought process of how I will manage to survive when the boat is hit by lightening and starts to sink: grab a piece of debris that might serve as a flotation device (perhaps a seat cushion?); let go of my bag and computer, as hard as that would be; don’t panic in the dark, deep water…all with “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion playing in the background of my thoughts.  As I watched the lightening strike the water around me, I found myself focused on a topic that I started contemplating before running in the Boston Marathon this year (and even more since):  bucket lists. 

As I was training this year, a lot of people’s reaction when I told them I was running a marathon was “well, cross it off your bucket list!” -- the assumption being that running 26.2 miles had been one of my “bucket list” items, because why else would a recreational runner my age with a full time job and three kids decide to do such a thing?  It’s a fair assumption; however, I was always slightly uncomfortable when confronted with that sentiment because, in fact, running a marathon had not been on any type of “list of things I hope to do before I die”.  And as I thought about it further, I do not have any such “bucket list”, nor have I ever been motivated to create one.  Why is that?  Lack of ambition?  I don’t think so; I certainly have goals, professional and personal, that I strive for; and in many ways I find I am never satisfied with where I am.  I am in constant motion, progressing from one thing to the next, and even before an experience has settled, I wonder:  where do I go from here?  And yet, I have never before conceptualized any of my goals as items on a “bucket list” or defined my goals in the face of, or as a rebuke to, death.  Why have I resisted documenting in a tangible way things that I would like to experience while I’m still on this earth?

When I mentioned this to my husband he said: “Well, I wish we could travel more at some point.”  I agreed; we have never really traveled together.  But I also feel that if we never did, if we never left our country (or even our town) again, I would be ok with that.  I would not feel as though my life had come up short.  And that was how I had felt about running a marathon before I was asked to try; it was not something I ever aspired to do, and failing to run one was not something I anticipated regretting on my deathbed.  However, when I was approached about running on behalf of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital last fall, I found myself hesitant to commit; and for weeks after I made the team, I only told my close family and made my training partner promise that we would not tell any of our friends that we were running until we were forced to for fundraising purposes.  It was as though speaking it out loud made the finish line too vivid and the possibility of failure too real.  What had never been a goal became the goal in front of me.  Throughout the process I would only say aloud that “I am training to run the Boston Marathon” – not “I am running the Boston Marathon”; it felt presumptuous to admit to wanting more than the chance to show up.

Before the bombings at the marathon, I used to complain that whenever I had plans to do anything (a party, vacation away, dinner at a restaurant, etc.), my mind would often play out the experience before it had ever occurred, progressing from start to finish in painstaking detail.  I could literally smell the recycled air of the flight back from my vacation, with all the memories and sun burned skin, before I had even packed to leave.  It was as though I wanted to try it on first, see how the experience fit, and decide whether or not it was worth actually pursuing, or whether it was a little too tight or too short to buy.  The marathon was not an exception.  I purposefully played out the day ahead of time, and ran the race from start to finish in my mind; in part to psych myself up and in part to attempt to control the future.

Since April 15, my mind no longer plays those games.  I am not conscious of avoiding this tendency, but have found that I no longer anticipate the outcome of planned events, or relish the memories of something before it has even occurred.  This is actually one small benefit that derived from my experience that day, but I am guessing it comes from my new awareness of the futility of expectations; of the reality that airline baggage gets lost on vacation, dinners out get cancelled due to stomach flus, and bombs halt marathons. 

The more I have thought about the moment when the race was stopped, in addition to the intense fear and the total incomprehension (emotions that I am not quite yet ready to process), if I am being entirely honest with myself there was, somewhere deep inside my brain, a slight sense of relief (both physical and emotional).  Part of my type-A, over-achieving self knew that there would be no time to report; no benchmark or comparator against which to judge my performance.  My marathon run, while exceptional in so many ways, would be equated to the runs of so many others who were stopped at the same time that day.  It would simply be unfinished and, as such, unassailable.

Perhaps I reject bucket lists for the same reason.  Because I am intimidated by a sub-four hour marathon and would rather not admit to having any goals about finishing, let alone my time.  Perhaps I do not want a list of things I hope to do before I die, because I know there is a likelihood that many of those things will go undone.  That no matter how specific and targeted my list, there will always be things that go undone.

One of my friends who survived a similarly traumatic event told me that in the wake of her experience she felt as if she had attended her own funeral, but not necessarily in a bad way.  I experienced a similar phenomenon with the outpouring of concern and love on April 15 and the weeks that followed; friends and acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to in years, as well as new friends I had only met weeks before, cared whether I or my family had been hurt.  I was told by more than one person that in the moment they learned of the bombs, or in the seconds after they received my out-of-office message saying that I was running in the Boston Marathon that day, their hearts stopped and they thought of me; they feared my loss and momentarily grieved a world without me in it.  These are enormously powerful things to hear.  They are humbling in the most intense sense of that word, and brought me to my knees with both sadness and gratitude. 

And so perhaps I am just blessed to not feel that I need a bucket list to tick-off experiences and achievements as I march through this world.  Perhaps it’s not that I fear failure so much as I feel loved, and that no matter how I spend the rest of my time, and even if it ended on April 15 or tomorrow, I would leave knowing that there were people I impacted, and people who would miss me.  Because when I lay in bed at night with my oldest child, having navigated the stormy commute home safely, he told me that my explanation of how lightening travels outside the perimeter of homes and into the ground doing no harm (an explanation for which I have no scientific basis) made him feel so very safe.  And in that moment, it didn’t seem to matter whether I can check off another goal achieved.  I’m not sure that there is a name for the list of experiences that I want to collect in this life, but I know that you don’t pre-determine and cross them off; you add them one by one in the most unexpected ways.