The Bucket List

Something a lot of my friends and family are always asking about is my ever-growing bucket list. If someone wants to go do something with me and it is on by bucket list I am like a kid in a candy store. No better yet, a toy store because getting too many of these goals doesn’t make me sick, just completely overjoyed.

Some of the goals sound strange to people like: having a picnic under a willow tree, riding an elephant and a camel, touching a ‘bird of prey’ with bare hands, star gazing under a harvest moon, volunteering at a hospital to hold a baby or planting a carnation and watching it grow from seed to bloom. So you may wonder how my full list came to be (which is TONS longer than what I wrote above). When I came to Washington and my life changed I realized a lot of things, one of them being that unlike most people I hadn’t had any goals in my life, not real one that I actually wanted to pursue.

People would tell me about their goals, their dreams and what they wanted out of life and I would nod along and be so happy for them because they had something to achieve in this life and I believe that anyone who has a goal that feels so important to them and that they feel passionate about can achieve that goal. So my fiancé (BF at the time) realized I didn’t have any and asked me to make one. It took us ages to figure out what to choose and from there, it slowly grew. I started writing them down a few months ago when I realized how different my goals were than what I would have expected.

I realized that while I wanted to see the world and experience so much, I still wanted, more than anything, the one thing I had always wanted: to help, inspire and make amazing memories. This is where the ‘how my list ended up odd’ part happened. I tried to think of beautiful memories. Things that I could imagine looking back on fondly like I look back on the one time I went horseback riding with my mother, lavender gardens with my future mother-in-law and getting up to watch the sunset over the docks with my fiance. The goals start simply: I have always loved carnations and recently have found a love for watching plants grow from a seed (above mentioned fiancé gardens), wanted to know what a owl, falcon or eagle’s feathers felt like, wanted to know what it felt like to ride on the back of an animal used for so many years in different parts of the world I have never been to. Naturally, any precious memory I could/can imagine having, holding and never letting go of goes on my list as something I want to make a reality.

Do you have a bucket list? What type of life goals do you have? Can you tell us the strangest one?