What's the List For, If Not To Do It?

As you can probably tell from recent posts, we deal with loss a lot here in the Trenches.  Lately, that loss has been both professional and personal.  A little over a year ago, when Office Testosterone was first diagnosed with cancer, I whipped out my Bucket List and updated it.  Then, I saved it on my computer, and......did none of the things on it.  I know - human nature.  Life gets in the way of all the big things you want to do.  Then my father became frail, and Office Testosterone got worse.  Still, I did nothing except whip the list out and read it (and maybe add an entry to it every now and again).  At last week's collaborative training, one of the learners was a colleague I've known for many years:  a hard driving, tough minded career woman who is about my age.  I hadn't seen her in a while and commented on it.  She told me that she had just come back from a year's sabbatical.  That's right, she took a year off from the practice of family law to do her bucket list.  She figured that her parents weren't getting any younger, although they were still in good health, nor was she.  A lot of items on her list were physical pursuits, like hiking, that she might not be able to do "when she found the time."  So, she made the time, she did the things she always wanted to do.  She's back now, and has no regrets.  Maybe we can't all take a year off to pursue our dreams, but surely there's time in all of our busy schedules to do a few of them on a regular basis.  You never know what life will bring:  you could be 91 and done everything you always wanted, 79 and die after hitting your head getting out of a pool, or 22 with your life just ahead of you until that cancer diagnosis.  For a lot of our clients here in the Trenches, their married life, which they thought would be until death do they part, ended a bit earlier than that and they have to start building their lives again.  The point is that we will all have regrets in our lives; there are always unexpected circumstances, and dead ends reached.  What's important is that we not let the road not taken, or the bucket list not pursued, be part of that.  Sign me up for trapeze school.