Be Intentional: Seize The Day Bucket List

Do you have a “Seize the Day” list?

Or a”Before I Kick the Bucket” list?

A “Live Life Intentionally “list?

I ran across mine the other day. I still haven’t milked a cow, but surely someday I will receive that blessed opportunity from somewhere (like a farm, but it is probably more likely that it will be at a “farm to table” cooking class).

On the other hand, I was surprised to see that I have actually accomplished some of the things on my bucket list since I wrote it a couple years ago. I might not have been deliberately standing there with my checklist, but I have begun purposefully working on it.

Success!

It’s not that I have to do all these things.  I can experience a full life without doing them. I know at the end of my life, what I will regret is whether I lived and shared what I believe. If I loved and experienced love.

But I also think I’d feel appeased in fulfilling some of this list. There is just something about dreaming and making fun goals. It has been said “You can’t achieve what you do not attempt,” and a list helps me be intentional about deciding what I want to attempt. You see, a bucket list isn’t so much about death as it is about intentionally living, exploring, and challenging oneself to be alive. These experiences (and generalized goals) shape me into the person I want to become.

Live Life Intentionally!

What is on your bucket list? Make one! Can you share it with me?

Can you guess what I completed on my list? Which things on here do you want to add to yours? What do you think is my strangest thing to accomplish?

Elisa’s Bucket List

(The seize-the-day stuff I want to do before I die)

• Take a Euro-Train

• Go to pretty much every museum in DC area

• Write, have my grandma illustrate, and then publish a children’s book

• Be a reader for an audiobook (on Libravox?)

• Try to write a fiction book

• Go to Cirque du Soleil

• Milk a real cow or goat

• Adopt or foster a child(ren)

• Go to Burning Man Festival

• Do NaNoWriMo, writing 1500 words per day

• Surf more successfully

• Play a slot machine and lose ten to twenty bucks

• Try to fence

• Try to shoot a bow

• Figure out how to play Fur Elise

• Figure out how to generally play the piano by reading music (level 3-7?)

• Make a paint by numbers of Van Gogh Starry Night

• Play in chords I, V, IV

• Compile a book of my music/poetry

• Successfully play the guitar well enough to casually lead a worship time

• Start leading worship music again

• Record a CD of my music at least to have

• Host exchange students

• Live in a commune (or with other people)

• Be commissioned to do some type of creative project

• Go hiking somewhere very mountany-cool

• Swim in the Dead Sea, visit the garden of Gethsemane, and talk with Palestinians, Israelis. Or just talk with Arabs in the Middle-Eastto hear their stories and try to understand

• Listen to bagpipes in Scotland

• Visit a live volcano or go cliff jumping in Hawaii

• (Vaguely) chase a storm

• Go parasailing

• Go rafting

• Go to every state in the USA

• Live weeks or months in Rome, feeding the homeless by the old city lunch everyday

• See the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame

• See the Mona Lisa

• Throw message in bottle in ocean

• Visit the Waterlilly’s painting by Monet and go to his gardens

• Go back to the Trevi fountain in Rome and throw a coin into it

• Visit Prague, Budapest, Romania, Venice, an a Nordic Country

• See the Northern Lights in Alaska

• Go to each continent by the time I am 29, like I said i would at 18

• Experience as many places/cultures in the world as possible

• Have regular family dance parties

• Go to a real Oktoberfest festival

• Go to a fancy party in a big city wearing a very fancy special dress

• Get red high heels or exciting sparkly shoes

• Own red pants I can rock

• Dye my long hair red

• Be in two places at one time (like in a sci-fi or fantasy way)

• Go to the world famous museums- the Louvre and Prada

• Spend a day “working” on a farm

• Tread wine grapes

• Go on a wine tasting adventure

• Follow Jesus

• Be intentionally always making disciples of those around me who are “learners”

• Not always need to “do” to find my self worth

• Go skinny-dipping at a beach

• Go backpacking somewhere

• Be a “camping family”

• Make a quilts out of my children’s old clothing and blankets

• Finish a wedding scrapbook by my tenth anniversary

• Fly a kite at Kitty Hawk

• Be confident and not needy – know how to walk with God in my neediness

• Help build a house for someone (Habitat for Humanity?)

• Successfully grow my own veggies

• Learn enough survival skills for my family to be able to survive over the winter

• Go to a tea party at one of those cute tea shops

• Have a great start, MIDDLE, and end to our marriage

• Eat raw, vegan or otherwise ridiculously healthy for a month

• Lose baby belly

• Sell my milk (like a wet-nurse. It is just so interesting. So why not?)

• Decorate a cake beautifully

• Have four kids

• Keep those kids alive

• Be on a TEDx talk

• Draw better, specifically proportions and angles and “life drawing”

• Pour into my church, empowering and equipping them to be all who God created them to be

• Sale a few of my paintings

• Do a 5K

• Renew my vows (like a destination wedding but a destination vowing?)

• Go overseas with those unlikely from my current J10 church family

• Fund a school

• Dance for exercise as a regular part of life (zumba?)

• Go on a cruise (because a floating world seems weirdly fascinating)

• Teach or empower my children learn a language

• Teach or empower my children learn music

• Live overseas with my family for one or two years

• Learn a martial art

• Support my husband’s goals

• Clean my house

• Get laser hair removal, like EVERYWHERE (Okay, maybe not everywhere)

• Inspire others to pay attention to injustice and truly love their neighbors around the globe

• Get a master’s degree

• Teach at a college (A social science? Literature?)

• Teach or sub for art classes

• Pay off our house and buy another to rent

• Always have people live with us to experience life with, and help know and follow Jesus

• Take another road trip around the country (old people in a RV? Child graduation present?)

• Always be hospitable – have an “open” home

• Take my daughter to Europe

• Visit Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria

• Take my family to Disneyland/Disneyworld

• Be given a superb surprise birthday party

• Free people from oppression

• Work for a non-profit

• Toilet paper a house or something

• Get a boob job (Haha! Just kidding!)

• Start a FREE art/music center for the community to be community at and for purposefully mentoring teens

• Work for a coffee shop- or at least make a good cup of fancy joe like a barrista

• Entrepreneur a coffee shop where people can play music and read and read and read while various art for sale graces the walls (library meets studio meets cafe)

• Stay humble even when I am “big”

• Be a well-read blogger

• Guest post for both Huffington Post and at LifeHacker.

• Be a philanthropist or work for a foundation: Designate how to use other’s money to help people

• Be given a superb surprise birthday party

• Do a couples massage

• Have a paying job in communications

• Learn to cut hair well

• Learn how to defend myself (and teach my daughter self defense too)

• Always be mentoring one or more young teen girls

• Take graphic design classes or otherwise learn how to do computer design decently

• Win a fiction contest

• Publish short stories or poems

• Refine my teaching/public speaking skills and use that gift

• Help my best friends do what they are called to do

• Live life WITH God rather than FOR him

• Value people, not dependent on, or constantly thinking about whether they are right or wrong when I am with them

• Innovate ways to make a profit from a skill I have (is that even possible?)

• Read what others write, because I like it when others do that for me

• Watch/participate in the process of making coffee (such as roasting it)

• Commit to always offering to bring food/help to others, even when inconvenient

• Be one of those people who is constantly at peace and just is content with whatever thrown at them

• Change the world!

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