Of Bucket Lists And Buckets
Unlike my generation, most young people today are most unfamiliar with what was once the common task of carrying a bucket. And yet, with a glibness that defies good sense, even people in their teens and twenties nowadays speak of having “bucket lists!”
We carried buckets all the time - with hot water to soak clothes in or bathe ourselves with; with cold water to water the plants and wash the floors; and with ice-cold water to fling upon each other with impish glee.
Now lest I be accused of being yet another insufferable adult who relies upon the ridiculous, patronizing phrase, “when I was a young man,” to bring to remembrance a mythical time that never was, I should point out to my readers that I make no such claim.
Every older adult imagines an unverifiable time in the past, bygone and buried, when a lot of things were supposedly better or wiser or sweeter or even greener! I remember as a teenager, being sat down and told from time to time, that I was getting off lightly with some infraction of a parental (or grand-parental) rule and that “in their time,” they would have received a proper hiding if they had done the same disobedient deed (which they would not have dreamt of doing, of course!). What utter rubbish! what hypocrisy! what imagined fantasy! I would fume to myself - and I still fume, without the fire and smoke, when this happens to hapless teenagers in our circle of family and friends.
It is verifiably true though, that we did see and use (and misuse) actual buckets in our time; that we could have literally made a list and dropped it into a bucket if we wanted to; but that we were so busy with our lives and had so much less money, that we had no time to consider “bucket lists” of wishes and resolutions that stretched into the always uncertain future.
After all, a bucket was meant for the eminently present and practical task of carrying water - and not for holding lists! The origins of the rather energetic phrase, “kicking the bucket” are obscure, but kicking (and spilling) the bucketful of water was presumably the penultimate act that occurred just prior to the departure of the soul into a hell where bucketfuls of water would be mockingly irrelevant; or a heaven where the bucket would be completely unnecessary!
It is no co-incidence that although the term “kicking the bucket” has been in use for at least two hundred years in our language, the “bucket list” was born only less than twenty years ago, after Hollywood released “The Bucket List” in 2007, starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson.
The combination of multiple mechanical conveniences to modern life and the ability through the internet to learn about how green the grass supposedly was on the other side of the fence, allowed human beings to come up with their own “bucket lists,” their own version of a checklist of “must do” things before they too succumb to the “way of all flesh” and die.
There is another very important reason that the “bucket list” was invented in the twenty first century. Compared with the previous 1000 years of history, the universal, relative prosperity of Western (and now Eastern) nations is unprecedented. When this is combined with the hundreds of hours most people spend on the internet every month, a subset of the population almost all upper middle-class, can indulge in making several lists, none more important to many than their own “bucket list.” (I should hasten to add that the rich don’t need bucket lists - they can do all the things in their bucket list without actually making a list!).
It would be an interesting study for our social anthropologists to investigate and tell us how many bucket list items are modified, changed or deleted from year to year - and how many of the original lists are completed. Even more interesting would be to learn through narrative investigation, whether completing a “bucket list” item actually made people more fulfilled, whether it gave their lives meaning and purpose.
Of course, there is abundant meaning and purpose to such things as helping the poor and dispossessed, in weeping with those who weep, in clothing the naked, in feeding the hungry, in visiting the sick and those in prison, in working for peace and in living out the Gospel. But I suspect that those who do these meaningful, purposeful things either don’t know what a bucket list is - or have never contemplated making one!
Previous generations likely believed life to be too uncertain to plan bucket lists far into the future. Uncertainty and mortality have not departed the present generation - and are as true today as they ever were, since the sources of uncertainty today are very different from those of a hundred years ago.
Previous generations were also keenly aware that this mortal life is played out in preparation for immortality and eternity. Items on most bucket lists would have seemed frivolous and transient to them - like faint claps of thunder that die upon the passing clouds and are heard no more.
The New Testament might have been describing bucket lists in the epistle of James:
“A word with you, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go off to such and such a town and spend a year there trading and making money.' Yet you have no idea what tomorrow will bring. Your life, what is it?”