Bucket lists revisited

Revisiting bucket lists, I'm coming out against them. They're all about experiences and that woosh factor, thrills and spills and far away sunsets. Good though they are, as lived in moments, none of that counts for much. That's all OK but it's not life, it's not what life is about. I'd rather build a tower and have it stand for a thousand years that just jump from a tower with a parachute and then need to do it again. The huff and the puff of the walk and the journey are fine but it's the footprints in the fresh snow that tell the story of where you are and where you went to. What we are is fragile and contradictory, what we experience is vapour and impossible to share but what we create from and around those things is the real deal. You realise it only in stages, quickly and in the moment as life takes huge strides and passes you by. Sitting on a warm couch, listening to your grandchildren talk about school and games and football. In a restaurant with children and partners and grandchildren, living on through their dreams and tensions, their hopes and what they will do with their hands. Friends who laugh with you, holidays and sunshine. Deleting the emails you don't need to read and turning away from what and who wastes precious time. So you film and build, record and write, draw and capture the arc of that perfect story, make discoveries, push yourself to capture this time, this time that is now. Because you'll never have it back again.

Less whoosh, less whamm, more life (I so used to draw these things up...).