Life Lists

I recently watched The Bucket List. The premise (if not obvious from the title) is the main characters crossing some "musts" of their lists before they die. Morgan Freeman's character says that he was assigned the project in a freshman college class and that the lists were full of serious and weighty things (solving hunger, finding cures, etc). Jack Nicholson's take on it is that it should be fun, like skydiving.

My senior year of college, one of my teachers assigned a similar project, where you needed to make a list of 50 lifetime goals in the following categories: Job/Career, Physical/Health, Family/Relationship, Cultural/Educational, Community/Political, Financial/Material, Spiritual/Humanitarian and then a wild card / fun category. So my list from the spring of 2000 has 53 things on it. I haven't looked at it for a while, but pulled it out.

Here are a few things that I can check off my list:
#1 Work in a national park
#8 Go parasailing
#13 Participate in more winter sports
#22 Go on a trip with my friends once we are out in the real world
#29 Adopt my pets from the Humane Society
#38 Spend time every year doing service for others
#44 Live west of the Mississippi

A year or so, I read a book called The Next Thing on My List by Jill Smolinski. In this book, the main character is trying to complete the life list of a stranger who died. The author's web page has some suggested list categories like ambitious, crazy, fun and self-improving. Something else that I like is that she challenges readers to try a 40 day challenge where you endeavor to do something new every day. In briefly glancing at her blog, not all have to be fun, as one day she threw out her back, which was new, though not fun. I'm intrigued. Maybe this summer I'll try 40 days of fun. What better time?