7 Things To Add To Your Bucket List

By Emily Plummer on August 18, 2015

1. Travel the world

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Okay, this is quite an ambitious task to start off with. Realistically, traveling the world isn’t something you ever get to cross off your bucket list. Instead, it’s more of a reminder of the limitless wonder the world has to offer, there to give you the ambition to see it all.

From your backyard to Antarctica, Half Dome in Yosemite, to the Coliseum in Rome, to the Great Wall of China, to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, to Machu Picchu in Peru, there are an endless number of sights to see.

So pick out your favorites– if you’re a fan of great brushwork, make a visit to the Sistine Chapel, if you’re more excited about wildlife, take a safari through South Africa– and start planning a trip. Take a plane, a boat, a train, a car, figure it out along the way.

Get a map to put pins in the places you’ve visited, and as you cover the globe your world will become a smaller, more familiar place, with pins to remind you of the people you met and the sights you were awed by.

Fair warning though, traveling isn’t just an experience, it’s an addiction– the more pins in your map, the longer your list of destinations still to visit will become– but that’s all part of the fun.

2. Skydive

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You may be the type to read that word, skydive, and look the other way, close your computer screen, and pretend you never came across this list. Or you may be the type to instantly fill up with adrenaline, ready to jump out of that plane right now if you were given the option. Whichever person you are, or someone who falls in between, consider the following:

You’re sitting in an airplane, glued to the wall, watching through a window as the land beneath you becomes smaller and smaller, feeling the straps of your parachute-backpack tight around your body, and then the plane door opens. You can hear the wind flying by the doorway, see the white clouds all around you, see your imminent path towards Earth, and someone’s telling you to stand up. You follow their orders on shaky legs and move to the open door like none of this could possibly be real.

Then suddenly, it is, as you are at once falling through open space, the airplane far above you. You’ve felt what it’s like to fall before, but not like this. Your nerves are tingling, expecting your body to be caught and stop moving at any second, but the ground is still a long way down. It stops feeling like falling, in fact it seems more that you are floating there in space, surrounded by sky. Instead of fear, you feel wonder, Is this happening?

You are part of the sky and the clouds and the wind rushing by your ears, being pulled toward the surface of the Earth like everything else on the planet. Out of nowhere, your fall is restrained, you’ve slowed down. You look up, there’s a great big parachute open above you, and you are flying.

3. Learn a new language

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With about 6,500 languages spoken around the world today, we have plenty to choose from. Learning a new language not only opens you up to communicating with those who speak it, but also gives you a window into their culture.

Japanese for instance, comes with many gestures and conjugations specifically aimed at showing respect to others. Guugu Yimithirr (an Australian Aboriginal language) is known for its exclusive use of geographic directions (north, south, east, west) instead of our more familiar egocentric directions (forward, backward, left, right).

Learning new languages will put you in touch with each people’s traditions and values. So consider a place or a people with which you’d like to become more familiar. Maybe your family has roots in Austria, or you’ve always wanted to visit Brasil. Pick up a phrasebook, take a class, and immerse yourself in another language and culture.

4. Meet your favorite artist

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Whether your favorite artist is a musician, an author, a painter, or a screenwriter, do everything you can to meet them. For whatever reason, your favorite artist has the power to connect with you through their work, and that is something incredible.

Meeting with such a person will allow you to gain insight from them on a personal level, to see who it is that created the things you love, and if nothing else, it will give you the opportunity to tell them how much their work has meant to you.

5. Write a short story

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If you love writing or hate it, if you know you have something to say or have no idea what you might put on a page, try writing a story. More than a craft or a hobby, writing is an outlet, a method of communication with others, or even yourself.

Your story doesn’t have to be long or eloquent or perfected; simply engaging in the process of creating characters and settings and a plot can tell you something about the people and places and ideas that are important in your own life.

Next, you can try all sorts of art forms – painting, dancing, sculpting – and discover which ones call to you. You may discover a new appreciation for the arts, even a new way to communicate your thoughts and ideas.

6. Watch a sunrise and a sunset from start to finish

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The beginning and end of each day bring beauty into our sky routinely. It’s easy to catch the oranges and pinks and yellows of sunset on your way home from work, or above the rooftops on your street while walking your dog. It’s also easy for this beauty to be overlooked or unappreciated because of its daily presence.

So someday, pick a spot where you can see the eastern sky on a clear day. Get there while it’s still dark out, before even one ray of light has made its way above the horizon. Then sit and watch the transition from the blackness of night to a new day, as the darkness slowly fades, making way for brilliant rays of orange and yellow to streak across the morning.

Stand witness as the sphere of the sun peeks into the sky, inch by inch (don’t forget to protect your eyes of course), until night has completely subsided, the day upon you.

Then, turn to the west, and do the same for a sunset.

7. Do something kind for a stranger

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Most of us in the world are strangers. We don’t know each other, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do things for each other. Buy coffee for the person in line behind you at a cafe, make lunch for someone who needs it, or engage in some community service.

Think of the way your day is improved when someone you don’t know is especially considerate without expecting anything in return. We can all be that person.

Maybe if we begin to take part in these acts of kindness every day, we’ll get some in return. Then maybe the world won’t seem so full of strangers, but of kind individuals looking out for each other.

These are 7 things that have been on this author’s bucket list. They are suggestions for experiences and endeavors that this author believes would enrich one’s life.

Take them or leave them, but here is the most important part: make a list and start crossing things off of it.

The world is full of adventures and opportunities that we should each take advantage of. Yes, there will probably be time in the future to complete the items on your bucket list, but there is also time now.

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