My Own Bucket List

Last night I watched The Bucket List. I especially like both actors, Jack Nicolson and Morgan Freeman, so I knew it would be good even if I had known nothing else about it. Of course, as most everyone knows by now, the movie is the story of two men who have each been given less than a year to live and their attempt to fulfill their dreams before they kick the bucket.

After the show ended and I had shed tears at the appropriate moments, I watched one of the special features on the DVD, the one that included an interview of the writer. I was a bit surprised to see that he was very young (or does everyone now seem very young to me?), but his "older" wisdom became more credible after I learned that he had interviewed several older people (including celebrities) about what they might include on their bucket list.

Reminded that I had created my own bucket list a few years ago, I pulled out the notebook that I had begun in 2000. Several things were going on that year. I turned 50 years old and celebrated 20 years clean and sober. I was also dealing with some age-related issues that included thinking about what possible reasons there were for why I was still alive and, at the same time, trying to accept the uncomfortable fact that I would someday be a corpse. It seems that it should have been either one issue or the other, but complex issues are rarely that tidy so I was working on both at the same time.

My "bucket list" was titled "100 things I want to do before I die." I only had seven things on the list, and there was some redundancy even among the seven. What I had in common with the characters in the movie was that I included skydiving on my list. In fact, skydiving was first on the list which is especially incredible because I have a psychopathological fear of heights.

Skydiving does seem to me to be the ultimate existential experience. I can imagine being suspended between life and death, simultaneously reveling in the thrill of life, the force of wind against my gravity-driven beating heart, while contemplating the possibility of becoming a crumpled pile of bloody flesh, bones, and excrement.

Existentialists consider the fact that we live "with a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world" according to Wikipedia (which someone pulled from a couple old, obscure textbooks.)

It is by embracing and accepting those very psychic conflicts that validates our free will, our choice of a world perspective, and the behaviors that are congruent with our individual Weltanschauung. (Damn, I love that big word!)

Skydiving, then, is the appropriate metaphor in action for the anxiety associated with wrapping one's arms around life. For a couple hundred bucks, I could not only mark skydiving off my list, but could move onto the rest of the list and accept those that are redundant as just part of the absurdity of being alive.