Bucket List!

Bucket List

What: Monthly Group Blog Posts
Why: Because of Andes Cruz & Her Indomitable Spirit
Who:

• Andes Cruz
• Mary Spencer
• Stephanie Nocito Clark
• Shaun Young:
• Brad Severtson:
• Beth Cyr:
• Kathleen Krucoff:
• Laura Flavin:
• Andrea Bell:
• Thomasin Durgin:
• Natsuko Hanks:
• Barbara Donovan:

This month’s topic being my bucket list.

I think I could get excited about this

For the past 3 and a half months, I have been running around like a chicken with its head cut off (not a pretty image, is it?) madly building websites about essential oils and schooling at home, signing up with accounts at Elance and Guru.com, applying for jobs as a grocery clerk (among other things) and generally acting frantic and disjointed. Oh, and I took a 3 week trip to California and a 12 week course in Advanced Psychopathology (almost finished with my MS degree).

It’s not like I didn’t enjoy all that I have been up to. I have enjoyed nearly every minute. But honestly, I think I need a bucket list. I need a list to refer to when things get hectic.

Those of you who are mothers (and yes, I think more so than the fathers, but I’m sure I might be wrong) may understand this: since I have become a mother, I have completely dropped the idea of “my” goals — things “I” want to do before “I” die. Quite rightly, I think, I am happy — I am content. My children and my family are sufficient for me. I never thought those words would come out of my mouth…and anyone who has known me for very long must think that I was abducted by aliens…fair enough.

So it’s a bit different from “before kids” — I don’t **need** to do anything before I die…that’s a bit of a weird place for someone like me to be in…but truly, if I died tomorrow, I’d die content with what my life has become.

So, why a bucket list, then??

Because I think I’m ready for one again. I think I need one.

My bucket list, for the past 10 years has been, if I am honest with myself, to have a happy family. I was under the mistaken impression, before I had kids, that if I did all the right things, and said all the right things, I would have a happy family. As it turns out, it’s not that easy. So I dropped everything, and all my focus went into that one goal.

As it turns out, I had to *not* listen to the wisdom of my elders (bless them), and, in many cases, I had to turn popular culture on its head. I had to do (here I am going to mangle Willa Cather, sorry) “live like everybody, while not being like anyone”

So, goal accomplished. Whew. And time for a new bucket list. A new set of goals.

Scary, really.

1. Spend time reading, writing, speaking and listening to French and Japanese.

Use French in my daily life. Pass level 2 of the Nihongo no ryoku shiken.

2. Begin my counseling practice.

Make positive change in my community. (this requires an entire page in itself)

3. Publish a novel.

(in the midst of all the chicken-with-head-cut-off running around, I did enter a fiction contest. I ought to enter more of them)

4. Publish original research in a peer reviewed journal.

Preferably on how great mindfulness is : ).

5. Earn a decent wage : ) (that would be nice)

6. Have more of a leadership role in my community.

Really work for positive change.

7. Not sacrifice one iota of happiness that exists in my family right now. It would not be worth it. Not for all the tea in China, not for anything.