The other side of the bucket list

I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this, but the problem with accomplishing a huge lifelong dream is that on the other side of that accomplishment is the realization that, for the time being, you no longer have a huge lifelong dream pulling you forward.

It seems like the worst kind of first world problem to cry that all your dreams have come true and now you have to go through the process of creating new ones. Who could possibly feel sorry for that kind of lament?

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, since on paper I’ve accomplished everything I’ve dreamed of, but somehow I don’t feel like I’ve come to the end of the line yet. I still feel pulled forward by things that have, on paper, already been “accomplished”

If I had to put words to the vague bucket list I had when I was a little kid it probably would have been something like:

1. Invent something
2. Discover something

I pretty much wanted to be an old-school naturalist, sitting under a tree in the woods and putting shit together in my head. Why do birds to X and bees do Y? What animal made those tracks in the mud, and where was it going, and what was it going to do next?  (Clearly this would have been my bucket list at age 7 or so, when animal tracks were the height of burning mystery and discovery – but I still have a huge fascination for them so really I’m not knocking it)

 

In my adult life, I managed to check these two items off the list hundreds of times over. I became a research scientist. I became an inventor. If my hypothetical ~7 year old me had written a bucket list on a piece of paper, and internet links didn’t exist yet, I could staple my (boring, technical) patents to it, and my (equally technical/slightly less boring) scientific papers to it and honestly say that I’d accomplished all I’d set out to do in life.

But if that was the end of it, where would I be in life? What are we if we don’t have our dreams and ideas and hopes for the future pulling us forward?

I have defined myself by my need to invent things, discover things – big and small.   I don’t even care about my patents all that much, aside from being grateful for having that section on my CV. I’ve “invented” so many more satisfying things in my life that will never be awarded patents. Workarounds for my backyard hose, a reinvention of my sprinkler, creative uses for vacation lamp timers, a cat climbing tree that makes use of an awkward corner near my kitchen. So while the patents are the tangible “proof” that I’ve accomplished that goal, the heart of the goal is just a reflection of the heart of who I am. And constantly expressing that part of me in big and small ways is what makes me happy. Not just changing my list from:

1.       Invent something 

2.       Discover something

To

1.       Invent something

2.       Discover something

 
It’s like the difference between moving to a country you love, living there, soaking up the air and water and food, making friends, building  a life for yourself there – versus landing at the airport, dashing out the door, crossing “visit Tahiti” off your to-do list and then posting to facebook: “DID TAHITI!”

Maybe my ideal ‘bucket list’ would look a lot more like

1.       Keep being a person who loves inventing things

2.       Never stop discovering

In that way, they become things that I can never really “scratch off”, because it becomes more about me always having those things as part of me. Not a memory, not a picture showing a tangible single accomplishment, not a one-time goal to touch, but something that reminds me of who I am.

Then again, maybe bucket lists – good ones (aka ones that reflect things we really want, regardless of how relatively non-triumphant or cool they may seem to others) – are a starting point to tell us who we are.  And there’s something so satisfying about having the kind of list you can scratch off, because that also fills the human need to see signs of progress.  

This morning I woke up and was thinking about what a “scratch-off” bucket list would look like for me now. 

I think it would look like this:

1.       Have visiting professor status at a university in Tanzania

2.       Have full time professor status at a university in US

3.       Link the two together so I can become a conduit of ideas and students that enrich their own and each other’s lives and education and careers

4.       Develop adventure education-based tourism business where we can all be old-school naturalists together. (what animal DID make those tracks in the mud, anyway?)

5.       Find ways any interested family member could help with and benefit from the business

6.       Go back to school again for a (specialty) Masters

7.       Buy Volkswagen Westfalia to drive around and car-camp and explore in (if it was good enough for Jane Goodall on the Serengetti….)

8.       Spend as much time as possible outside work with my family

When I try to translate that list, I feel like I’ve never gotten very far away from

1.       Invent something

2.       Discover something

(with the addition of a third)

3.       Share those things with others  

Maybe finding new ways of checking the same things off my bucket list forever is really the key to happiness. 

Transitions are HARD

Sitting in my warm bed at 8am, rain pouring down and (happily, if I'm honest) inhibiting today's long run, I'm driven to reflect as obsessively as I have been recently - transitions, empty nesting, huge life change? It's all very hard. So much harder and in so many different ways than I thought it would be.

If your life were a movie montage, it would be the Rocky run through Philadelphia, or the hard push before the triumphant finish. It's the spice and sweat that adds depth to the sweet, sweet finish.

But in reality when you have to live through it, it's so confusing and there's no guarantee that you'll have any triumph at all at the end of the day.

Yeah, at first you have confidence that it'll happen.

I had so many plans for the things I was going to accomplish. High on running endorphins I was SURE these things were going to happen and I had endless energy for trying to move myself forward. A few setbacks, missing Ky, questioning myself - a long run, endorphins, a big rally! - more work, more setbacks, more missing Ky, more questioning myself.

After six months? This pattern gets really old. There are only so many rallies I have inside of me in any given time. I wish for a win - ANY kind of win - to get my creativity flowing and my confidence up.

It's such a different animal changing your life in your 40's than it is in your 20's. Man I used to love reinventing myself. Selling everything I owned and starting over was like molting into a butterfly with cool new patterns and a new home range. But I could do it over and over again, and each new life was an interesting adventure.

Things totally change when you're older. The stakes are higher. What seemed like a cool adventure now just looks flaky to everyone around you. You think about money a lot more. Retirement funds and tuition and the realities of spending years paying for an adventure are pretty well known and have created a lot of negative associations.

I feel, in a way, like this last reinvention should be my last one until I'm an old lady and my flakiness can be called "feisty" and people will marvel and my "moxie" and "spirit" instead of worrying about me and wondering when I'll grow up and settle down. I figure I have about 20 years before that will be a socially acceptable option for me.

So if I can get this next transition to work out, I hope I can enjoy it and its many fruits for a couple of decades, at least.

Redefining

One of the hands-down hardest things for me in the “young empty nesting” journey is that I am not actually “young”. Compared to those who hit empty nesting and retirement in roughly the same life stage, yes I am. But compared to the demographic I keep running into in my day to day life, I’m the older generation.

Why does this matter?

Because so much of what I want to do, so much of what I’m trying to accomplish, is simultaneously being attempted by 20-somethings who are just starting out. And I envy them. I envy them their freedom, their ability to make mistakes and shrug them off as life lessons, the forgiveness society and family and friends seem to have for the various failings and flailings of a person trying out something new and not making a very good job of it. 

And in the search to start out in a new place, a new career, a new phase of life – it seems like my companions are either 60-somethings with their lives figured out, or 20-somethings with their lives completely ahead of them. And I fall in the middle.  

Some of life I’ve figured out. I’m happy with my body. I’m pretty sure I know what my major strengths and weaknesses are. I know what my life values are, at least the major ones, and I can look back over the decades and see how they’ve played out consistently in my choices and my successes and failures. I have made enough mistakes to have generated a list of the things I know I no longer want to spend my life doing. I have found places I need to improve and have invested years, sometimes decades, in trying to improve those areas. I’ve seen progress, I’ve seen backsliding and I’ve come to terms with quite a bit of negative/unfairness/ and also know that there have been times (many times!) I’ve been given chances I didn’t deserve. Bonuses I hadn’t earned yet. Experiences I hadn’t worked as hard for as others who were sharing those experiences with me. 

In some ways I feel a little wisdom has crept into my life over the years. 

But other areas in my life have not been given the same amount of consideration and growth and room for experience. I’ve been a mother since I was a college student. I went from a teenager hoping to get into college to a college student hoping to land a job with benefits to cover my prenatal OB visits. I went from thinking I should maybe sell all my furniture and do some world traveling after graduation to buying baby books and a stroller. I was never a carefree, world-wandering, finding-myself 20-something. I was a young mother, instead. A hard worker. A grad student juggling a part time job and a kindergartener. 

Any thoughts of “who am I, and where do I fit in the world?” that would have been completely appropriate for a 22 year old to have, I stuffed down inside of me while my child ran past me with a pack of other little kids in our back yard and I sat there feeling like… if I let myself wonder that, if I really asked myself that question, I might find that I felt regret or sadness or hopelessness at what turned out to be my destiny of single motherhood. That in truth, where I fit in the world might not be in a back yard in a college town, watching my child run past me with a pack of neighborhood kids. And I felt, at the time, that if I thought those things, it would mean that I didn’t love my child. That I would be tempting fate to wish for a different life. That it would make me a bad mother, or that it would mean I regretted Ky’s presence in the world. 

Now, with Ky in college and my motherly love well established to myself, in myself, over the years, I realize that those thoughts would have been okay to have. I could have felt simultaneous love for my child, and regret that I wasn’t a footloose 20-something in a maxi skirt and tank top taking a train through east Africa and living in hostels.  (somehow, this is how I always pictured “traveling the world” – always in the long skirt and tank top, always on a train, usually reading a book as the scenery flew past, the book coming in to the fantasy to show that I’d traveled long enough and with the expectation that I would still be traveling a long enough time in the future to allow myself not to look at every passing mile. More miles would come. More scenery would happen. That was the feel I always had, and stuffed down so I wouldn’t look too closely at it…)

Anyway, what it comes down to is this. I’ve read that if you miss a life stage at any point, you feel compelled to live that life stage out in some form, even when it’s age inappropriate behavior. And I keep that in mind when I acknowledge that my burning desire right now is to be that woman on the train, leaning on my backpack, reading a book… but in this version of my fantasy, I’m now 40 and I know that I should look up more often. No future miles and sights can be reliably expected, and that acacia tree really has its own beauty, its own story, that might be different than the 100 I saw in the past several miles. 

I wonder if it’s possible to live out a life stage I missed, as a 40-something year old woman, that is normally lived through my the 20-something year old me who happened to be following a different path back then, and couldn’t quite make the trip – but more importantly to live that stage in a 40-something year old way? Can I still take the train? Should I let those dreams go? Can I still make mistakes, and be forgiven for them? Should I even worry about forgiveness? Can I use my own strengths to do what I’d dreamed of doing, but do them in a wiser way?

Can I redefine the 20-something year old experience of finding my way in a new career, and through new places, as a 40-something year old woman?