Checking all the Boxes
I recently came across and news segment and an article about creating a reverse bucket list. It didn’t seem that impactful in the moment. I don’t have a checklist of things I want to do before I die, but I am a very goal oriented person. I create a to-do list every day and I feel accomplished with every box I check or every item I strike through. After reading a little more about it, it really did make sense to make a list of your accomplishments, and keep the list going because it shows how productive your life is and you will want to add to the list. However, I forgot about it quickly. Then, as life often does, it sent me a little reminder.
After a pretty stressful week, I was feeling like I just wasn’t meeting my own expectations. I was thinking of a list of things both personally and professionally that I needed to tackle. I decided to order pizza for dinner since it was a Friday and I had no desire to cook, which lead to feeling guilty because I wasn’t cooking something healthy for my family, which lead to feeling like I was working too much, which lead to feeling like I didn’t have all of the work done that I needed to. Basically a giant snowball of stress started pressing on me as I drove to the point that I felt dizzy.
We live in a world that values and places emphasis on “having it all”. But, for many of us, we aren’t even sure what that means. Does it mean having a career? An education? A family? A house? A dog? Good looks? Health? Happiness? How many boxes do we need to check before we actually reach success? My mind was racing, by heart was accelerating, and I pulled into the pizza place to pick up my order.
Just then, I saw a family carrying laundry into a laundromat. There were several kids, LOADS of laundry, and as I watched I thought about where my husband and I started out over a decade ago and how that used to be us lugging our clothes from our apartment to the laundromat (or parents’ because it was free). I found myself feeling grateful for something I take for granted and actually loathe doing. I felt myself take a mental note of something for that reverse bucket list: owning my own washer and dryer. That was something I swore that I would have back when I was 22 in that laundromat, waiting for my clothes to dry.
That started a trickledown effect.
Here I was, in a parking lot, ready and able to purchase dinner. This is not something I could have done ten years ago. I mentally added that to my list. In a few seconds worth of time, I thought of many ways that I have worked to make my life different than what it used to be and how those changes were positive for many reasons.
The point is, this tiny exchange, this small observation, did make me realize how thankful I am for the life I have and even if it’s not perfect it’s pretty great. This was a good reminder that I don’t need to check all the boxes all the time. My stress went away instantly. It was quite a testimony to the power of positive thinking.
We all need to give ourselves a little bit of grace; in a world that is so fast paced and demanding, it is easy to the lose sight of the positive. It is also easy to forget that somewhere out there, someone is wishing for exactly what we already have.
