The very words “bucket list” can stir up some pretty heave-duty fears. Defined as a list of things to do before you die, it can be a reminder of our own mortality, and death is typically something we would rather not think about. But, the reminder that our time is limited is actually one of the best gifts we can be given. It is one that can guide us to achieve what is most important to us before it is too late.
Life is short.
We fuel our bodies with food, our minds with education and our hearts with love, but new experiences and dreams can nourish our spirit in ways that nothing else can. Whatever your goals or dreams are, there are benefits to turning them into a bucket list, a well-crafted one can push you to lead your version of an ideal life.Many people will live their entire lives without having any idea as to what they really want. They will follow societies conventional expectations of getting married, working the same office job for the next twenty years, buying a home and having children – all without giving it a second thought because that is just what they are “supposed to do”. But, if that path is not their true passion then life will end up leading them, instead of them leading their life.
What do you want?
The process of writing a bucket list forces you to take a close look at what it is you truly desire, to analyze where you are versus where you want to be. It very well may be the career, children and home, etc., but it may also be something entirely different.When sitting down to contemplate what your future will look like, your dreams and what type of experiences you want to have will be brought to the forefront. By asking yourself what you truly want, setting goals and consistently reexamining your goals, you gain a self-knowledge that will propel you in the right direction. Many people’s sleepless nights are the effects from having a mind filled with countless tasks for the next day. But, what if what kept you up at night were thoughts of planning your dream vacation to spend the night at a Bedouin camp in Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert or going back to school to study French viticulture, what you are truly passionate about? Then being awake would be because of excitement, a reason to get up early in the morning and stay up late at night.
When you are stuck in the rut of day-to-day life, it can be difficult to get excited about the day that lies ahead. A bucket list gives you a reason to spend that extra hour a day working, putting meaning behind the extra effort because the additional money will be why your dream of ice climbing in Iceland will come true. It can create an excitement deep in your soul and exposes the passion you thought you had lost many years ago. A bucket list will give you a sense of direction that allows your mind to focus on the target, instead of getting sidetracked dawdling on social media or watching reruns of the Kardashians (I am admittedly guilty of that sometimes too!). It will help you determine your end goal and the steps that need to be taken to get there, keeping your eye on the prize. For example, without a clear career focus, you may just take every promotion opportunity given, switching departments and ending up as the executive production manager, when what you really wanted was to be a marketing director.Without clear goals it’s easy to get diverted, heading in multiple directions and years later ending up in a place you really never intended. Even with goals, if you cannot remain focused you will lose momentum, which will lead to a loss of motivation and ultimately failure at achieving the result you desire. But with your bucket list you will be able to continuously refer to it in order to reenergize your focus. Without motivation, your dream will be nothing more than that; it is the necessary energy that pushes you to accomplish your goals. Motivation is why race car drivers win trophies, business owners become millionaires.
About the Creator
Angelina Velasquez
I love writing makes me feel alive..!
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Self love
The Inner Voice Somewhere in our minds, removed from the day to day, there sits a judge. They watch what we do, study how we perform, examine the effect we have on others, track our successes and failures – and then, eventually, they pass a verdict. So consequential is this judgement, it colours our entire sense of ourselves. It determines our levels of confidence and self-compassion, it lends us a sense of whether we are worthwhile beings or conversely, should not really exist. The judge is in charge of what we call our self-esteem. The verdict of the judge is more or less loving, more or less enthusiastic, but not according to any objective rule-book or statute. Two individuals can end up with wildly different levels of self-esteem even though they may have done much the same things. Certain judges simply seem more predisposed than others to lend us an essentially buoyant, warm, appreciative and generous view of ourselves. Others encourage us to be hugely critical, often disappointed and sometimes close to disgust. The origins of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalisation of the voice of people who were once outside us. We absorb the tones of contempt and indifference or charity and warmth that we will have heard across our formative years. Our heads are cavernous spaces and pretty much all of us have voices echoing within them. Sometimes, a voice is positive and benign, encouraging us to run those final few yards: ‘you’re nearly there, keep going, keep going’. But more often, the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. It doesn’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities. We find ourselves saying: ‘You disgust me, things always go to shit with someone like you.’ An inner voice was always once an outer voice that we have – imperceptibly – made our own. We’ve absorbed the tone of a kind and gentle caregiver, who liked to laugh indulgently at our foibles and had endearing names for us. Or else the voice of a harassed or angry parent; the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down; the words of a schoolyard bully or a teacher who seemed impossible to please. We take in these voices because at certain key moments in the past they sounded so compelling and irresistible. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodged in our own way of thinking – for better and for worse. Exercise: An Audit of Our Inner Voice We can catch the sound of what our inner voice is like when we prompt ourselves to finish certain sentences: When I do something stupid, I usually tell myself… When I succeed, I usually tell myself… When I’m feeling lazy, my inner voice says… When I think of what I want sexually, my inner voice says… When I get angry with someone, my inner voice says… Does the inner judge strike you as kindly or punitive? Whose outer voice became your inner voice in the context of each question? (write down their names)Why the Inner Voice Matters Our level of self-love is very consequential across our lives. It can be tempting to suppose that being hard on ourselves, though painful, is in the end quite useful. Self-flagellation can feel like a survival strategy that steers us clear of the many dangers of indulgence and complacency. But there are equal, if not greater, dangers in an ongoing lack of sympathy for our own plight. Despair, depression and suicide are not especially minor risks. Afflicted by a lack self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible, for one of the central requirements of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for ourselves, built up over the years, largely in childhood. We need a legacy of feeling that we in some basic way deserve love in order not to respond obtusely to affections granted to us by prospective adult partners. Without a decent amount of self-love, the kindness of another will always strike us as misguided or fake, even as strangely insulting, for it suggests that they haven’t even begun to understand us, so different are our relative assessments of what we happen to deserve. We end up self-destructively – though unconsciously – disappointing the intolerable, unfamiliar love that has been offered to us by someone who clearly has no clue who we are. We are highly alert to the dangers of people who have too high a regard for themselves. It is a serious put-down to suggest that someone may be ‘in love with themselves’. Self-love seems connected up with narcissism, vanity, selfishness and a blindness to the needs of others. But for the most part, our real problems lie in a very different direction: with tendencies to be deeply and unfairly hostile to ourselves, with a habit of taking exhaustive stock of our failings, of refusing to forgive ourselves for idiocies and of being suspicious of anyone strange enough to think well of us. If we saw someone else treating us the way most of us treat ourselves, we might think them despicably cruel. For the most part, it just feels more normal and therefore oddly more comfortable to be disliked or ignored. We seek out partners who will do us the favour of not thinking any better of us than we think of ourselves. The contempt isn’t necessarily pleasant, but at least it feels familiar, and in some ways right. If we are not modestly but genuinely convinced of our own lovability, receiving affection will just simply feel like being bestowed a prize for an accomplishment that we haven’t ever earned. People unfortunate enough to fall in love with self-hating types must brace themselves for the recriminations due to all false flatterers. We will know there must be something wrong with anyone who has the bad taste to get enthusiastic about someone like us. Without the sufficient ballast of self-love, we will go on to reject positive treatment across a range of areas: offers of friendship, of professional promotions and of praise will all set alarm bells ringing. We will blunder in interviews, sabotage our work opportunities and grow strange and rude around possible new friends – in attempts to bring our outer reality back into line with our inner assessments. Changing the Inner Voice It may, at this point, be tempting to say that we shouldn’t judge ourselves at all. We should simply approve and love. But we should determine that a good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge; someone who needs to be there to separate good from bad but who can always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves, rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves. Part of improving how we judge ourselves involves learning – in a conscious, deliberate way – to speak to ourselves in a new and different way – which means exposing ourselves to better voices. We need to hear constructive, kindly voices often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel like normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they become our own thoughts. One approach is to identify a nice voice we knew in the past and give it more scope. Perhaps there was a kindly grandmother or aunt who was quick to see our side of things and who would offer us deft words of encouragement. If we knocked our orange juice all over the carpet, they’d remind us that accidents can happen to everyone (last week they themselves spilt a cup of coffee over the sofa). Instead of promoting a punitive, critical voice, they represent a calm, understanding way of addressing failings. We can try to focus on this kind of supportive approach and summon it on a regular basis; rather than waiting for it to pop (as it rarely does) into our heads we can deliberately nurture and train it. When things don’t go as we want, we can ask ourselves what this person would say – and then actively rehearse to ourselves the words of consolation they would most likely have offered (we’ll tend to know immediately). Traditionally, religions have attempted to help us in the task of providing us with benevolent voices. They have lent us reassuring, kindly often maternal figures whose voices they suggested we absorb into our own minds. Buddhists, for example, were introduced to the goddess Guanyin, a reassuring deity a little like the Virgin Mary who could hear us in our distress, meet us with tenderness and strengthen us to face the tasks of life. Guanyin’s implicit thesis is that being loved and worldly success are two separate things. You deserve compassion not because of the excellence of what you do, but because you exist. Achievement should not be the currency of kindness. The root of extreme stress is usually not purely the fear that one might fail. Rather it is the incendiary thought of what failure will mean: that we deserve to be ridiculed and abandoned. When the threat of that emotional catastrophe is lifted, one is better placed to get on and cope with the practical tasks before us. The other major strategy for changing the voices in our heads is to try to become an imaginary friend to ourselves. This sounds odd, initially, because we naturally imagine a friend as someone else – not as a part of our own mind. But there is value in the concept because of the extent to which we know how to treat our own friends with a sympathy and imagination we don’t apply to ourselves. If a friend is in trouble our first instinct is rarely to tell them that they are fundamentally a shithead and a failure. If a friend complains that their partner isn’t very warm to them, we don’t tell them they’re getting what they deserve. We try to reassure them that they are essentially likeable and that it’s worth investigating what might be done. In friendship, we know instinctively how to deploy strategies of wisdom and consolation that we stubbornly refuse to apply to ourselves.
By Angelina Velasquez5 years ago in Humans
I Fulfilled My Mother’s Dreams, Not My Own
I used to believe that love meant sacrifice. That if I gave enough of myself away, it would somehow turn into happiness—for everyone involved. So when my mother talked about her dreams, the ones life never let her finish, I listened. And slowly, without realizing it, I picked them up and carried them as if they were my own.
By Imran Ali Shahabout 19 hours ago in Motivation
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