I have said before not to put down things on your list because it “ought” to be there if it does not speak to you. If you hate running, don’t put down run a marathon. If you aren’t into spending a lot of time in the great outdoors, maybe leave off spending a week in a tent. If sports aren’t for you skip Fenway Park. However, that does not mean you cannot still find inspiration in those goals. 

Why does running a marathon grace so many people’s lists? What does running a marathon represent? What cultural values might we find in this goal? To many people it represents peak fitness. After all, the first man to ever run a marathon allegedly died delivering a message of an invasion, so running a marathon and not dying is an indication of fitness. Which makes the modern marathon a weird flex on a poor dead man – I digress. It also represents perseverance, discipline and overcoming obstacles.

Would developing other health goals fulfill those same things? Perhaps being able to bench press your own body weight or even do ten full pull ups. Those could be just as impressive feats of physical prowess, require just as much discipline and are for many people significant obstacles to overcome. I hate running, but I enjoy weight lifting. Having strength goals to meet and overcome are my own version of a marathon and being strong rather than fast is more important to me. I’m not living someone else’s life training to run a marathon when what I want to do is be strong enough to wield a war hammer. Both reflect the values of fitness, perseverance, discipline and overcoming obstacles. One might be a more popular version of it and imho an inferior one, but this is neither the time nor place to debate the merits of running vs. weight lifting.

Being healthy is a goal that everyone has. After all, being healthy feels good. So I absolutely encourage you to adopt fitness goals that resonate with you as a person and are reasonably obtainable. What is a measure of health for one person isn’t the same for another given their own limitations and inclinations. Someone with long term chronic health conditions may find that just getting out of bed and being able to walk a few steps is equal to a marathon. They may spend hours in physical therapy trying to get their body to do tasks many of us never think about. And there are many different kinds of body types that are better or worse at certain tasks. A cursory examination of the various sports in the Olympics will showcase various body types, levels of muscularity and abilities, all are in peak physical condition for the task they are trying to perform. The sprinters look very different than the long distance runners. So ask yourself what are the tasks you want your body to perform and then train for those tasks. 

Health of course is not the only thing that graces a bucket list. What are other typical bucket list items? Usually there is some sort of travel like tropical islands, seeing certain things like the pyramids, experiences like sky diving, perhaps life milestones like graduations, obtaining certain degrees, owning your own business. Just as we can easily dismiss those items as “not my thing so not for me” we can easily miss what they represent. Consider owning your own business. You don’t have the capital to do so and even if you did, you know you’re not the sort of person who would enjoy doing so, but what it may represent is having a certain level of freedom within the realm of finances. Having both enough money and freedom to do what you want with it are worthy things to strive to. How you get there may look very different for different people. Perhaps, you want to expand your horizons intellectually and so you add read a certain number of books. However, reading 100 classic books would make your eyes bleed, whereas reading the top rated fantasy novels breeds excitement. Funnily, enough you’ll find that there are books that grace both lists such as Dracula and Frankenstein. 

Once we start considering the actual goal behind the thing, it is much easier to get creative with how we want to approach our own list without getting caught up in the pressure of doing things that don’t resonate with us as individual people. Revisiting common items or even uncommon items, reflecting on what they represent and asking ourselves if those ideals resonate with us can lead us to some surprising experiences or looking at things in a different lens. Take for example, one person’s “walking across a suspension bridge” which at first I thought rather odd. However, for that person (and I’m just guessing) is she may have had some sort of fear about it. So getting across it was conquering a fear. So what was I afraid or anxious about? Well for a long time, spiders and other bugs. Public speaking caused massive panic attacks. So being able to deal with spiders and other bugs without freaking out and being able to give speeches on behalf of my job, are quite the accomplishments and deserving of gracing my list. If you’re someone who doesn’t have either of those fears, then perhaps leave them off.

What are things that you value? What are your areas of interest or expertise? Perhaps there are premier events in your areas of interest. Are you a nerd like me? Is comic-con on your list? Maybe you’re a civil war reenactor, then attending the reenactment camp of a famous battle like Gettysburg should be on your list! It isn’t so much about the thing itself but what is behind the thing. Once you do that it is easy to take inspiration from the things you have no interest in doing to expand your own list to include the things you do. It also has the added benefit of taking some of the pressure off to do certain things that grace most people’s list because you’re able to still fulfill the values of what those represent so long as those values are things that you actually want to fulfill (another post on that later).