How Is a Life List like a Bucket List – by Lyn Midnight

Welcome to Life List Club Friday! The best definition of The Life List can be found here. The Life List Club is about connecting, and publicly stating some life goals you’d like to accomplish over the next 12 months (for me that will be by the next 4th of July). It’s about encouraging others in their goals.

Every other Friday, all us Life Listers do a round robin blog hop. We like to spread the love. Today, I’m over on Gene Lempp’s blog and we have the lovely Lyn Midnight here with us…

Great to be here at More Cowbell! Jenny tells me the usual Friday topic is love, but I already talked about that on Emily Moir’s blog for the last Life List blog hop. So today’s post will deviate from the plan. I hope you’ll enjoy it nevertheless…

If you’re like me, you probably have separate lists for many things: favorite movies,
favorite songs, books to read, countries to visit, etc. Apart from this, there are the traditional New Year’s lists: things I’d finally get round to doing before the year’s finished.

The last one went like this:

1. Buy a professional camera and take a photography course.
2. Finish the BS manuscript and start querying.
3. Start an internship at a Publishing house and find a job in the field.
4. Finally try a Margarita on the beach.
5. Find someone special and don’t fuck it up this time.

Pardon my French. This is the list for this year, and I have to tell you: I haven’t done a lot of progress so far, and it’s almost September already. The only thing I did was try a Margarita, which I loved, but it wasn’t on the beach either.

Granted, some of these things do not even depend on me at all. Even though I believe that we can attract events in our lives with the power of our minds (see The Secret), it’s not so easy to attract a person who’s perfect for me. I’d have to do a lot more than a rain dance
wearing a coconut bra.

Yet, I can’t help but notice that the first three items are doable and far from impossible.
So why haven’t I done them already? Probably because I’m scared. I’m scared that I’ll fail so bad that I won’t be able to get up and move on with my life. Sometimes it’s so much easier to stay in a sheltered cocoon than get up, go out, and do things.

What’s more, my New Year’s lists have started to look a lot different from what they used to be. I used to write down small goals and try to achieve them in a month. The odds were looking brighter then. But as I started to grow up, I realized: I’d like to do a lot more things than my lifetime could offer. So the pressure of time made me incorporate those bucket list items into my New Year’s lists more and more each year.

Ironically, I have yet to complete an entire New Year’s list.

And my Life List is no different. It has those big dreams that I’ll probably chicken out on again, which infuriates me. Besides, between the end of the world next year (you know
it’s coming) and my 25^th birthday, I feel like someone’s putting a gun to my head, asking me to take a chance already and stop whining about it. Or rationalizing it.

To answer the question posted in the title, a Life List is a lot like a Bucket List, because both are meant to wake us up and get us moving. Lots of people never get to complete their bucket lists. And if you’d like to see a couple of crazy old farts doing otherwise, I suggest The Bucket List (2007).

But in order to escape this endless circle of premature failure, I feel like I need a push.
Maybe it’s from my fellow Life List’ers. Maybe it’ll come in November when I’ll  win yet another NaNoWriMo round. After all, NaNo does not expect me to do miracles in one month. It just gives me the necessary little pushes to get me out of my cocoon.

As long as I have those occasional pushes, I’ll believe that I can complete my lists. So
what if my New Year’s lists are ill-devised and too bucket-like? So what if my Life List is too scary to face? Maybe I’ll revise it. Maybe I’ll revise all of my lists.

Either way, I’ll keep making them. Otherwise, my cocoon will become my prison.

Have you been in a cocoon lately? Have you made progress on your list?

About Lyn Midnight

Lyn writes in various genres and formats (fantasy, scifi, poetry), and likes to blog about anything her heart desires over at Lyn Midnight Against the Odds. She is currently working on a scifi novel and managing another blog – The Burning of Innocence – where she posts fantasy flash chapters.

The person behind the handle is a Psychology graduate, and eternal nomad, trying to make her big break somewhere in England. Long live the Queen! And long live our dreams.

Attention: Writers! A writer who would like to become a contributor at The Life List Club, guest posting with us, please contact Marcia Richards: marichards320 AT yahoo.com or Jess Witkins: jessi.witkins AT gmail.com. At this time, the Life List Club accepts one new contributing writer per month. (David N. Walker is the September addition!) Membership is open to all – just state your goals publicly on your site and come see us on Twitter at #LifeListClub.