The Big Dream Bucket List

by Lori Dwyer on June 17, 2010 · 15 comments

Mushi mushi,

When I was twenty years old, I had a low grade epiphany. I was working part time, going to university… and that was about it. I kept having terrible flashbacks of the mother of a guy I dated when I was seventeen. She was so…. boring. Her life- her hair, her clothes, her house, the food she cooked- it was all grey, and always the same, day in and day out.

It terrified me. She was just so…. sad.

It scared me enough that I broke up with her son.

He was a bit of a dickwad, anyway.

It actually seems terribly conceited and judgmental now, as things often do with the clarity of perfect hindsight. Dickwad’s mum may not have been unhappy at all- she had her kids, her family, her husband, and was probably pretty content with her lot in life.

But that is entirely beside the point.

The nagging memory of the grey women acted as the perfect catalyst for me to make the decision to put some sparkle back into my life. Since leaving high school at eighteen, I had gotten real old, real quick. I no longer did spontaneous things. It felt like I no longer laughed at anything really funny, I just tittered along with the crowd. I was existing, untouched and uninspired.

I could not, and still cannot, think of a fate worse than a boring, wishy washy life.

I was scared right into making a list. A list of things I wanted to do with my life, while I still had a life to do things with. Because you just never know when you are going to be hit by a bus or a cement truck or a fallling refrigerator something.

A Bucket list. Not that I called it that at the time, this was long before the movie came out.

Before I share my list with you, reader-ers, I would like to point out that one of my motto’s in life is- Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed. I aim low. And I’m quite OK with that.

Lori’s Big Dream Bucket List

* Learn sign language.

* Sing on stage

* Paint toenails a different color every week for a year (umm… yeah, I’m not quite sure what I was thinking here, either).

*Learn to play an instrument.

*Get married.

*Have kidlets.

*Buy a house

*Get motorbike license.

*Ahem*

Like I said, I aim low.

Whatever. Limited aspirations or not, I am more than a little bit smug when I say that, in eight years, I have crossed everything off that list.

But one.

If I’m honest, which I am, most of the time; there was a sense of trepidation last year when the Bump was born. Because that was it (almost). The Bump’s birth put the ‘s’ in “Have kidlets”. And, just like that, I had completed (almost) everything on my Big Dreams list.

Including, I might add, “learn to play a musical instrument.” Because the ukulele totally counts.

That, my friends, should be an entirely satisfying feeling. It’s not. It’s quite scary. It’s almost like your number is up, your days are done, and a big tall man dressed in black with extremely skinny fingers and a big ass knife now has you programmed into his After-Life GPS.

Yuh uh. Like I said, scary.

So, what do you do when you have (almost) crossed everything off your Big Dream Bucket List?