The Bucket List Is Still Very Much Open
August – The Galapagos
I can’t wait
In August, I turn 86 in the Galapagos Islands.
I’ve been looking forward to it for months. The giant tortoises. The sea lions who couldn’t care less that you’re watching them. The extraordinary, unhurried wildness of a place that feels like it belongs to a different time entirely. A corner of the world that reminds you that you are a small but fortunate part of something rather magnificent.
People sometimes ask me how I decide what to do next. The honest answer is that I follow the things that make me feel truly alive.
Following What Calls to You
I’ve been doing that for a long time. I swam with wild dolphins off the Big Island of Hawaii. I travelled across Russia to the depths of Siberia, as far as the Mongolian border and the sacred Altai mountains, armed with precisely three words of Russian and a great deal of goodwill. I revisited India in my early eighties. In recent years, I sailed through Italy, Sicily, Malta and Monte Carlo, soaking up every moment of it.
And not because any of it was expected of me. Quite the opposite actually.
I’ve never particularly been guided by what’s expected. Life, in my experience, is far too interesting for that.
There is a phrase I come back to often: life is circular, not linear. We’re taught to think of it as a straight road with a clear beginning and a rather inevitable end. But I don’t believe that’s the whole picture. Every decade brings something new. Every year offers something you haven’t seen before, if you’re willing to look for it.
Curiosity Is the Point
The bucket list, in my view, should never be finished. The moment it’s finished, you’ve stopped being curious. And curiosity, I am utterly convinced, is one of the great secrets of a long and satisfying life.
I am not particularly interested in doing less. I am not interested in playing it safe, in shrinking my world down to something more manageable, in accepting that the best of it is behind me. It isn’t. I know that with complete certainty because I’ve felt it, this year, last year, and the year before that.
Living every drop of life isn’t about being reckless or relentlessly busy. It’s about being awake to what’s possible. It’s about saying yes when something calls to you, even if the timing isn’t perfect, even if people give you that particular smile that means they think you’re being slightly ambitious.
