Bucket list or picnic basket?

There are two things about getting older that seem to keep in balance.

On the one hand is that you have probably done a few more things on your bucket list. The things that you add as you get older starting to be part of the ridiculous range. I have for example added owning and living on a lavender/wine farm in France.

I know I don't speak French but Mon Dieu  I currently live in a country where I can't understand 95% of the population and at least in France I would understand the gesticulations and sneering.

A long time item in my bucket list has always been a pink Lear jet, now this item first appeared about thirty years ago or when my eldest would

sprout forth "I want" and I would always answer her with a "Well I want a pink Lear Jet". My eldest actually did get almost everything she wanted as she was such a sweetie pie that I found it difficult to say no to her, or I was buying her affection, one or the other. So surely I should one day obtain the much quoted Lear Jet.

I find it difficult to think of a bucket list as surely you should be happy with who you are and where you are is merely a matter of geography; and that interestingly enough not that important.

It is the same as wanting a new job; even if you think it would be the world shatteringly most amazing thing, if you did get your dream job, it would only be a while until the same stuff that annoyed you at your previous job would miraculously appear at your new job. The thing that is the same is you and your brain and the brain will not suddenly become something else due to finding itself in a new environment.

I have always wondered about people who win huge amounts of money and suddenly don't have to work, how long before they too would become disenchanted with what they did each day. Though I must say it would be a challenge that I would not mind participating in.

Travel is always supposed to be in bucket lists and there are quite a few places I would like to visit and experience their unique geography and strange people, but then the second half on the balancing act would kick in and we would have the mysterious picnic basket.

I think the bucket list has a partner and that is the disappearing picnic basket. The actual basket does not disappear but rather the content in it. If you think of the picnic basket of life, we start off with milk and porridge and slowly but surely add to this with the myriad of flavours that come from around the world and astound us with their uniqueness and variety. Then as we get older, slowly but surely, we take things out of the basket. We take out the items that we no longer can participate in as they will actually do us harm. Not in the stupid way that all the ponsy people whine that they are allergic to chocolate as it makes them fat, but, rather in a way that should you eat it, you will get very sick. I think that eventually you get back to the blandness of milk and porridge and then that part of the life lesson is over. I suppose that is also the same for all the senses that everything slows down and stops working with the same accuracy as when you are a teenager.

See everything in life is balanced, I like my life. I would not swop it for the torture of being a teenager, or angst of being in my twenties. So in conclusion, add to you bucket list, take out of your picnic basket, it all is unimportant as it all is part of the journey of life.

Whilst looking for pickies for this post I came across the Mad magazines version of what life is all about so lets all say Namaste to the authors of Mad; They seem to understand the silliness of a bucket list.