The Ultimate "To Do" List

This weekend, I went to lunch in Old Fort Collins with my family and a few relatives at a brewery restaurant. The food was decent but I got more to chew on. In conversing with Aunt S., the world titleholder for the best fudge brownies and a model of vibrancy in old age, she mentioned a cousin's idea to compile a list of 100 things to do before you die. Certaintly, this idea isn't unique, with book titles about “1000 places to go before you die”, but I see great value to it.
In writing college entrance essays you have to think formally about the topic, but mostly in the context of socially-prescribed, straight-faced ambitions -- “If you let me into Distinguished U, I will work tirelessly to obtain the peaks of scholarship, and during summer breaks volunteer to give sponge baths to lepers in famine-striken countries.” You are confronted with having to do something, and if you're lucky you have ambitions or talents guiding you to want to do something.

The choices and possibilities have multipied from the times when one's station in life was relatively fixed. And this can be an exciting development, but it can also precipitate terminal indecision and aimlessness, and the regrets of lost time. For which I vouch. So there's nothing to lose in the exercise, whether the list is composed of improbabilities, trivialities, goals, achievements, obtainments, or a great motley mixture. It's probably best for a mixture...

Without making the faintest plans for what you want, it seems more likely that more of what you want to do will pass you by, and that the problems and tedium of the quotidian will distract you from what you want to achieve.

Here's to get started on my list, in no priority:

1. Spend one month on the beach and in the ocean. Try surfing and kayaking and everything else. Ogle, ogle, and ogle some more.
2. Learn how to scuba dive. Did it (the blue), so now my goal is to become an expert and to dive on every continent short of Antartica.
3. Become fluent in Spanish.
4. Research, write and publish a great book. On anything.
5. Spend 5+ years traveling or living abroad.
6. Help my family and friends with some items on their lists.
7. Overcome my people-phobia and its legacy. Kick it in the $#@!*& @ss! ASAP.
8. See as many live comedy shows as I can of comedians I like. Read all their books and watch their routines and shows. Write my own brand of comedy for the helluvit (that mocks self-help lists).
9. Learn to cook the Indian food that I love, so I can have it every day.
10. If in the next fifty years, somehow affordable space tourism comes into existence, take at least one trip “out of this world.“