Writing This Post Was on My Bucket List

I’ve never left North America, seen the Statue of Liberty, or dipped a toe in the Atlantic. Nor have I ridden a motorcycle, bungee jumped, snorkeled, or skied.

I haven’t eaten beets, bratwurst, bread pudding, or anything with tentacles or pincers.

I’ve never had an actual, entire, beer.

I’ve never completed Harry Potter, Moby Dick, or A Tale of Two of Cities, nor seen The Godfather, Braveheart, or one episode of Star Trek.

And never—not once—have I dived.

And I’m mostly okay with this.

Some of these activities I don’t want to do. Some, like diving, have become mental blocks, nagging me my whole life. Some have just never presented themselves, though I haven’t taken the initiative to pursue them.

Maybe it is impossible to imagine how I would plan my days if I were granted a short time to live with unlimited funds. But I simply don’t feel the urgency to cross these kinds of activities off a list. If you told me I could fly to the pyramids tomorrow or stay home and drink good coffee with a friend on my couch, I’d choose the couch.

I’m not against traveling. I drive across the country and camp with my family each summer, romping in the deserts and mountains for weeks. And I’m not against trying new things. My kids talked me into riding a roller coaster for the first time last summer, and now I know I can survive spiraling upside down. (I’ll never face beets, though.)

But why do I resist even dreaming of doing the “bigger and better” things, let alone making plans to pursue them? I’ve asked myself this question many times over the years. I’ve seen it on the faces of friends and acquaintances who cannot relate. And I understand their confusion. Yet, the answer I return to, again and again, is really pretty simple.

I love the everydayness of life. Even when I’m anxious or exhausted, I hold fast to the smell of coffee coiling from the bag each morning, the shoosh of the sliding door as my dappled rat terrier slinks out to pee on the hose. When I do leave home, I bring my green blanket with me so I can feel the checkerboard weave against my face, stash the same Aldi dark chocolate in my purse.

While I understand why some people want to travel to ancient ruins or sway in the basket of a hot air balloon, experiencing a wider abundance from what the world has to offer, I’m pretty content where I am. And that’s not too difficult: I have a home, transportation, healthcare, and so much food that I periodically need to clean out my refrigerator. When it comes to how and where I move my physical body upon the earth, I just don’t want to change much.

Maybe underneath it all I’m scared. Or lazy. But I feel satisfied, even if haven’t carved my own pumpkin, run a marathon, done the splits, or milked a cow. Even if I’ve never been to the circus.

But I must confess that I’m not content with everything. There are a few things I’d like to accomplish before I die—a bucket list of sorts.

I want to live a day entirely free of worry, a day in which I wake without an inexplicable feeling of dread, or visualize my husband in a head-on collision, or obsess over whether the woman down the street is mad at me.

I want to love someone. Not a family member or friend (though that is hard enough), but a person I have never met, say, the woman handing me my prescription at the Walgreens drive-through. I’d like to see her wholly in the moment without judgment or hurry, wonder at the keratin pearls of her fingernails, pray the lines around her eyes and lips, fold her soul into mine as I pull away.

I want to lose myself completely in a task, to wrap myself around a rainbow bubble of soap as I wash a dish or disappear into the digital whirl of numbers on the gas pump.

I want to write a poem at the perfect intersection of intelligence and mystery, in which no other word or break or breath would do, or play a Highland air on my violin channeled straight from the chloroplasts of heather.

These things can’t be bought or booked in advance, which is perhaps why I want them. They will probably not be attained, at least in this life. But I could live for them, alongside them, in desperate hope for them until I boldly go where I’ve never gone before.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky (Cascade Poiema Series), A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” was recently released by T.S. Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Books & Culture, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, and the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011.

Photo above credited to Jenna Woodward and used under a Creative Commons license.