Tag: Gratitude list

Not your mama’s bucket list

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Bucket lists inspire us to live life fully, drawing us into imagining all the high points we hope to experience in this lifetime.  Ideally, we seize the day, jumping into life to accomplish that bucket list well before any immediate threat of kicking the proverbial bucket that lends its name to the list. Bucket lists propel us forward.

Ever one to prefer shaking up tradition by flipping ideas around, I’m inspired this week by the opposite process. Look back, versus looking forward. Memoirs and end of life reviews offer retrospective, as defined in a post at Reason Creek, in this way:

Retrospect is a simple looking backward, it has no judgment implicit within it. Hindsight looks back over errors, reminiscing looks back with rose-colored glasses.

Bucket lists share the same challenge as “to do” lists. All those glorious aspirations can leave us feeling like failures because we focus on what we are not accomplishing. Too many ideas in my head about how many things to get done, and by what deadline, just leave me feeling pressured to be enough. I am working to be enough just as I am. I still love my “DID DO” list, where I assess what I have completed. When a friend shared that she was tallying her “bucketed” list, rather than her bucket list, I fell right in line.

Take that judgment-free lens of retrospective, shift away from what you still wish to accomplish, and tune into what you have completed in this life. Voila, you have the framework for your bucketed list. Turns out this is a grand-scale gratitude list, expanding daily appreciation into the vast landscape of a life.

To barely begin to tally how my bucket is filling, here’s a few thrills I am ever so appreciative to have had in my life:

  • Giving birth to my daughters, and nurturing them into incredible vibrant women.
  • Having the trust of hundreds of clients, who welcomed me as a guide on their own life paths.
  • Wakened from a warm bed by my mom, to view the spectacular Northern Lights.
  • Eating juicy, warm plums from the trees on my grandparents’ PA farm.
  • Watching my cat give birth to kittens.
  • Counting fifteen shooting stars in one week in New Mexico.
  • Sailing a small boat with my dad, cold waves lapping at our freezing buttocks as he laughed his deep, throaty chuckle.
  • Learning to sew with my mom, and earning her praise and a hug for my crooked, fumbled zipper.
  • Catching a stunned possum, just-awakened from hibernation, in a winter’s wood with my sister when we were girls.
  • Riding a fast motorcycle with a high school boyfriend. I have the revving scream of the motor memorized still.
  • Attending an outdoor classical concert complete with an awe-inspiring fireworks finale.
  • Sighting a pileated woodpecker, a few owls, and indigo and painted buntings.
  • Sighting more than 60 bald eagles in one day, wintering in trees along the Minnesota River.
  • Watching more than 20 hummingbirds, dancing their territorial and buzzing dance around a friend’s NM feeder.
  • Gathering sap from trees with buckets cut from bleach bottles, then simmering it into golden maple syrup.
  • Riding in a boat right next to a pod of grey whales, flanked by adorable calves.
  • Visiting the Chihuly exhibit after dark at the Dallas Arboretum (see featured photo)
  • Seeing the “green flash” as the sun set over the bay in Florida.

What cherished experiences do you have in your bucket?

Daily gratitude practice, updated.

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The recommendation to make a daily gratitude list has become so common that your brain might be shutting down right now.  Yeah, yeah, you grumble.  The research is clear that sitting down each evening to list blessings in your life can increase happiness and well-being. And everyone older than three or younger than ninety knows it. “Lay off us, we’ve heard it before,” you may be thinking.

I struggle with it too. I know reciting my gratefulness can enrich my life, tempering the days I spend listening to woes galore. But do I do it? I’m just a lowly human being, and maybe this struggle is another way psychologists are just like you! When I’ve tried, I quickly get into a “CD on repeat”-type litany, writing about the same loved ones, health, strength, and security day after day. Starts to sound like blah, blah, blah in my head, and I doubt how that low level rumble can even make a dent in my psyche.

Doing my duty as a psychologist, making an effort to improve my skills, I was listening to an online seminar in my car. Selfishly, often: I want to improve my bag of tricks for clients and blog audience, but I also like to make my life easier. The name-escapes-me-today (see, I forget, just like you) speaker said that, in an effort to fulfill his own gratitude practice, he tries to find a new experience or moment to savor each day. This motivates him to move through his day mindfully, given that mindfulness also enhances our perception of living a good life. Throughout the day, he checks in routinely, keeping part of his brain attuned to new experiences or moments to appreciate.

I liked this. In even the worst days, there is at least one thing that lights me up, makes me smile. A kindness, a compliment, a hug. Often, there is one small item that makes me smile–or laugh out loud. I often text these ‘finds’ to my daughters, as a fun way to keep in touch.  I think I could do this. I set out to add this to my practice of bits of life to notice.

Meanwhile, the other challenge in my head lately is exactly how to jump into Twitter. The promise is that Twitter could increase my exposure, help me share my expertise, build my business. Since I announced my intention to do so, it’s been like learning to drive a car with a clutch.  Shift, stall, grind the gears. NOT quite as bad as sitting in the ’67 VW at the top of a hill with my dad alternately cajoling and yelling at me. But a struggle, to figure out what might shine even a tiny bit in the vast Twitter universe, making my comments worth a follow.

Grind, grind, go the gears in my head, chewing up gratitude ideas with tweets. The result that spewed out is my new daily gratitude practice. Each day*, my goal is to notice and tweet one event that made me smile. Since it appears that a clothing company already has a campaign linked to the hashtag #dailysmile, I’ll be using #dailysmiles.

Join me, won’t you? Follow and retweet–or let me inspire you to notice and tweet your own daily smile.

 

*(hey, I’m warning you, I’m only human.)