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My friend Lynda belongs to a group of a half-dozen women who are experts in a particular, slightly arcane area of Canadian law. These women are all driven and ambitious. They dream big and plan big. So when they get together once or twice a year, they want to make the time count. A few years ago they drew up a big, birds-eye-view “To Do” list to guide the group’s progress. It included:
- Start a blog.
- Set up a schedule for who will post and when.
- Meet regularly.
- Collaborate on papers.
- Publish those papers.
- Plan a conference.
High-fives all around. They agreed that these were excellent goals, and they had the best intentions to meet them.
But these are women who are more than their jobs. They have families. And tons of friends. They run. One of them writes poetry. In the context of their chockablock lives, that ambitious "To Do" list was proving to be a bigger burden than they’d imagined. As time passed, and the agenda items weren’t getting met, everyone in the group started feeling guilty.
Finally one of them said what everyone was thinking:
“Look, we love getting together, right? There’s a lot of value in these unbillable hours. But the last thing we need is more guilt.”
And so one more agenda item was added to the “To Do” list: “Make a “Never-Going-to-Do” list.”
“We basically agreed not to do any of those things we initially said we’d do,” Lynda says.
Not long ago, the group of women got together again. Checked in with each other. And then raised a glass of wine in triumph.
“In the past year, we’d done nothing on our list,” Lynda says, “and therefore achieved our goal.”
***
It is New Year’s Eve. The time when folks around the world turn an aspirational eye to the year ahead and perhaps reflect back on the gap between what they’d hoped to achieve and what they actually achieved—sending corrective resolutions heavenward with a puff.
This is not a bad thing. Reflection is the handmaiden of growth. Moral inventories can prompt useful course corrections. And it’s a proven stress-reducer to move unfinished business that’s been taking up RAM in your head onto a piece of paper for safekeeping. Whole careers have been made from this strategy (looking at you, David Allen).
But resolutions can become millstones if they turn into an inventory of the ways we consistently fail to measure up. Maybe the best gift we can give ourselves this New Year’s is a reality check. You know those clothes in the closet you never wear? The ones Marie Kondo promises it will feel incredibly liberating to throw out? It may be time to give the old bucket list the same ruthless cull.
I’m in my fifties. On my own bucket list, I recently realized, there are things I have been carrying over for decades. Things that at this point it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever actually knock off.
- Learn another language well enough to dream in it
- See the mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park
- Run another marathon
- Get back to my high-school weight
- Give away a million dollars
- Get my bottom teeth straightened
- Ride a unicycle
- Put all our digital family photos into physical albums
- Visit the village in North Korea where my Dad was born
- Beat someone under 20 at Anomia
Now, it’s possible a couple of these could still happen. But my assumption is that they won’t. So bye-bye to them. Fly away, little pipe dreams! Go build a nest in someone else’s brain.
There. Whew. Feeling lighter already.
Over the holidays, I stumbled on a list of 50 spectacular sites around the world. You check off the ones you’ve already been to and then press enter to find out, at the rate you’re going, how old you’ll be by the time you see them all.
My answer: Age 164.
One really can’t feel too bad about crossing off half the places it would theoretically be interesting to see. The world is a different place than it was when folks started making bucket lists of exotic destinations. Pandemics aside, we now know air travel is a big contributor to global warming. My striking off that trip to Rwanda to see the gorillas saves the carbon equivalent of a year’s worth of driving.
That feels good. The sense of sacrifice is more than offset by the sense of gain. (Kate Laffan’s work at the London School of Economics is on point here.)
Physical limitations are another issue. You can practically feel the cognitive dissonance resolving itself as you swipe a pen through things that are either nigh-on impossible to do at your age, or would require such Herculean time and effort that you’d torpedo the things that still are reasonably achievable.
Likewise, there may be things on your list that were put there for dubious reasons—like vanity or pride (those teeth). So nixing them leaves you feeling better, not worse. It’s cheap therapy.
There’s nothing depressing or defeatist about this exercise. It’s not about letting your dreams die; it’s about sorting them. Purging the ones that may no longer actually be your dreams—or at least dreams worth busting a hump for. In a way, you are homing in on a new definition of who you are right now.
- “Shoot my age in golf.” Made that vow when I was in my twenties. I’d have to have put my 10,000 hours in by this point. Not gonna happen.
- “Sail across the Pacific.” I get seasick.
- “Learn to make Parisian-calibre croissants.” I’m not even sure you can find the right flour here. Anyway, half the family’s gluten-intolerant. So.
- “Get to ‘inbox zero'” I have 105,000 emails, 35,000 of them unread. Short of declaring email bankruptcy, a non-starter. I’m good with that. Not an inbox-zero kind of guy.
- “Read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sextet.” Um: why?
The whole enterprise boils down to weeding out misgivings. “For me, success is not a public thing, it's a private thing,” the late Toni Morrison said. “It's when you have fewer and fewer regrets."
- “Live abroad with Jen and the kids.”
This one hurts. This private promise I’d made to the family, to the universe, was contingent on getting a big-enough book deal to pull it off. It hasn’t happened yet, and the kids are no longer kids.
I’m sorry y’all.
Letting it go.
Thanks for understanding.
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