The Well-lived Life

I saw another blog yesterday on which a young woman had listed off thirty things she had accomplished before her thirtieth birthday. My first thought was that this was pretty clever, and I even considered listing off fifty-one things that I had accomplished by my fifty-first birthday. I'm glad I didn't follow that notion. I would have regretted it. As I pondered the idea, I began to wonder whether or not it's a good idea to have a list of things I've accomplished, and that brought my mind to the notion of the "bucket list." That's an idea that has taken off of late. The bucket list, in case you're one of the two people in the country who hasn't heard of it, is a list of goals or accomplishments that you want to achieve or complete in your life. In this way, so the theory goes - at least as I understand it - your life will have more meaning. That sounds all right on the surface. After all, it's always good to have goal. Right? Well, maybe. You see, I worry about the idea of reducing "the meaning of life" to a checklist of places to see and things to accomplish before I die. See, what if I have this big list of things I need to do, places I need to see, etc, and I am able to check off every single one of them. Does my life then have more meaning than a farmer in France who's never been more than 100 miles from his home and has spent his life tending his fields and vineyards? And what if I don't manage to check them all off? Is my life now less meaningful than that farmers? Or than yours?

And all of this brings me to that big question of the meaning of life. What is it all about? Is it a headlong race to check off boxes on my own private To Do List? Is it the accumulation of wealth, the gaining of more money than I can ever hope to spend in one lifetime? Maybe for some it is, but not for me. There was a book that came out a couple of years back that looked at the people who live very long lives. Turns out that there are about seven spots around the globe where people routinely live well into their 90s and beyond. Sardinia, Italy. Ikaria, Greece. Nicoya, Costa Rica. Okinawa, Japan. Loma Linda, California. A couple of others. The researchers discovered that there were several factors that all of these groups of people had in common:

1) They worked outdoors.
2) They didn't smoke.
3) Their diet consisted mainly of fruits, vegetables and grains, with small amounts of high protein meat.
4) They had a close knit circle of friends and family who supported each other.
5) They had a strong religious affiliation (i.e., they believed in God).

They also walked a lot, didn't worry about what time it was, and took naps every day. You'll notice that there isn't a bucket list in that list. Nevertheless, these people live long, productive and very happy lives in spite of their poverty and their very simple living conditions. They don't accumulate masses of personal property. They don't drive fancy cars or live in McMansions. They don't spend their days plugged into their cell phones and iPads and their nights glued to the TV or computer screen. They don't have some arbitrary list of things they feel the need to accomplish before their lives are done. The live, they work, they love, they raise their families, they grow very old, and the die happy. What more, I ask, can any person really want of life than that? Well, I would like to see the Eiffel Tower. And Venice. I want to go to Venice. And.... Guess maybe I need to prioritize my own life while I'm at it.