it might be time to bring back the life (light?) list
About fourteen years ago, I was talking with Maggie Mason, who was sharing with me her “life list.” This was a list that she had created that, in her mind, wasn’t a “bucket list,” which she said focused on death, but a list of things she wanted to accomplish in her life. Her list was extensive — over 100 items — and some of them included things she was terrified of doing, like learning how to roll a kayak.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you’re terrified of doing this, why would you possibly want to put yourself through that?”
“It’s simple,” I remember her telling me calmly. “My goal isn’t to be a great kayaker. The truth is that once I learn, I might never get in a kayak again. And this is true of a few things on my life list. But I want to be a person who at least tried.”
At her urging, I came up with my own life list. Like Maggie, my list was extensive, and like Maggie, I added a few things on the list that vaguely terrified me. When the opportunity came to do one of them — number 67, flying in a hot air balloon — I conscripted an equally terrified friend to join me, and off we went. The experience was incredible. It turns out that pushing yourself a little out of your owndepth can be wildly transformative.
For a while, I began ticking items off my list — number 77, photograph the aurora borealis! number 61, visit Nairobi! — and each time, it was exhilarating. But then time passed, life happened, and I forgot all about it.
Fast forward many years later, and I thought of Maggie’s words again last year, while writing Radiant Rebellion. One of the books I read as part of my research was The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, by Daniel Pink, and one passage struck me deeply:
“One of the most robust findings, in the academic research and my own,” he writes, “is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn’t take than the chances we did … whether the risk involved our education, our work, our love lives —doesn’t matter much. What haunts us is the inaction itself.”
Huh. It seems Maggie might be onto something. “I want to be a person who at least tried.”
So now that Radiant Rebellion Is finished (it comes out in October, and is currently available for pre-order — it’s everything you ever wanted to know about joyful aging, and I’d so love it if you’d grab a copy for yourself and a friend!), I’m thinking perhaps it’s time to revisit my life list. A quick glance indicates that there are definitely some items that are no longer important to me. But even more critically, I don’t think I want to call it a “life list,” anymore — because that still feels a bit like a to-do list that needs to be checked off. I think what I want is a light list — a shorter, deeply curated menu of items that I can choose from, with no expectation of proficiency, or even lasting avocation. Just things that might bring me some joy and light. Just things to at least try.
More soon, radiant rebels. Stay tuned.
A little about the new book.