Once in a lifetime
I’ve been spending a lot of time over these past couple of weeks thinking about “once in a lifetime” experiences. In this short time there have been events like watching Lindsay Vonn win the Downhill at Whistler, and then there are those like 64 crew members, all friends of my son, surviving the sinking of their ship.
I have followed the comments from a friend who is in Haiti helping administrate the setting up of programs to get the earthquake victims on their feet again, at the same time as reading about the tragedy of the young Georgian Luger.
I am wondering what affect any or all of that will have on me in the coming years. What will I remember? What will move me to action? To Change? How will I be motivated to be different or better? What will I do with what I know?
I have an aversion to the ‘Bucket List’. The notion that we create a list of things we want to experience before we ‘kick the bucket’. I worry that our lives can quickly become a series of ‘Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt’ activities.
I helped chaperone a group of high school kids on one of those trips to Mexico to build houses for poor people. One of the kids, a 17 yr old, said that if felt good to be able to ‘tick off helping poor people from my bucket list’.
I am all for seeking out those once in a lifetime events, and I definitely want to have my list of things I want to do. Where the challenge comes is having those opportunities become a means rather than an end to themselves.
February 24th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
A major source of the pesky dissatisfaction that we carry through our lives is this craving for completion. It’s a craving that can NEVER be satisfied because there is no such thing as completion, no such thing as a resting place, no such thing as a fixed point. It’s all flux, all the time, everything causing everything else, everything coming into existence and dissolving, with no solid, fixed moment anywhere. I think a big step towards liberation is realizing and accepting that you’re never done. You’re going to have to keep realizing that over and over too. Or something like that. Is this babble?
February 25th, 2010 at 12:09 am
I don’t think its babble at all Sean, I just wish I’d said it….
March 10th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
It seems to me that every moment is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Not to denigrate what you are saying, but I think we miss a lot, o.k., I miss a lot of meaningFUL experiences because my head and heart aren’t where my body is.
March 10th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
I have a serious need for non-completion, or at least for starting up new things. There’s got to be a balance in there somewhere…
Re: your original post, Rory. Makes me think, hard. I gave myself permission to really enjoy the Olympics, but most of it felt so potato-chippy–addictive and insubstantial. For me…but also perhaps for the city. The outcomes remain to be seen, but our immediate reversion to our cars feels like a harbinger.