What do I want to have done, achieved, experienced, before I \u201ckick the bucket\u201d? This is the \u201cBucket List.\u201d It becomes ever-more relevant for some and less so for others. My wife, not relevant. Me? A bit.<\/p>\n
A cousin as part of his Christmas greeting sent me a picture of his holding the New Zealand elk, with a vast rack of antlers, and the innocent comment that this was yet another item off his bucket list. This reminded me of the subtle sense that I too keep a vague bucket list, and I decided to make this a bit more explicit.<\/p>\n
A little later my darling wife offered to share a bit of news about some item\u2014never mind what\u2014and I found myself courteously declining—I did not want to add this novel information to my mind. I remembered that recently I turned off a couple of DVDs, too, though I would have fallen into finishing watching them a few years ago. What had changed?<\/p>\n
I realized that I was turning away from an underlying attitude I had acquired as part of my cultural conditioning: \u201cDo not avoid opportunities for broadening your horizons. That would make you narrow and unsophisticated.\u201d Wow, I was not buying into this, at least not as much. I used to buy into that commandment a lot. I now view it as stoked-up quasi-addiction to any product of any medium that is offered to me without too much of a demand for lots of money. Well, if it costs little or nothing, sure. Wrong. It\u2019s as bad as junk food.<\/p>\n
A third theme coming together on this has been two people who have talked to me about addiction, and I\u2019m drifting towards a neo-Buddhist perspective that recognizes that not only subjugation of a race is wicked, and subjugation of a gender, but our own slavish mentality that allows us to be subjugated to media. Wow! \u201cMedia addiction\u201d? Could that be a recognized condition in fifty years? <\/p>\n
Thinking about addiction, my wife reminds me of the social imperative of concepts, like the bucket list. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to do these ten things before you die.\u201d Who says? Our appetites collude with these bits of \u201ccommon sense.\u201d In fact, I\u2019m deeply content much of the time, but am prone to becoming discontented by being reminded of all that I\u2019m missing out on. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is an interesting new disorder, now that we have so much more access to activities that give us the illusion that we\u2019re really \u201cwith it\u201d and not missing out. But of course, it\u2019s all illusion.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m settling in, and as part of that, missing out, and surrendering to how very very much I\u2019m missing out. I\u2019m not all free, let me confess. The variety of interests and involvements is still significant, even though I\u2019m letting go of many others. But I sense a theme here\u2014getting focused, getting in the groove. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What do I want to have done, achieved, experienced, before I \u201ckick the bucket\u201d? This is the \u201cBucket List.\u201d It becomes ever-more relevant for some and less so for others. My wife, not relevant. Me? A bit. A cousin as part of his Christmas greeting sent me a picture of his holding the New Zealand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,16,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-papers","category-literacy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1582,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions\/1582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}