In April I tripped over something that wasn’t supposed to be in the middle of the road and wound up in the hospital emergency room with a broken radius and ulna on my right hand/wrist/arm.  My friend who accompanied me to this place said, “Well, I can check ride in an ambulance off my bucket List!”  Often our first definitive bucket list is a part of the retirement process. Often the list emerges as a retirement planning exercise.  Over the ”golden “years items on the list can be checked off and new ones added

Most of the people  in my age cohort started with travel—places to go, things to experience. As the list gets checked off and age takes its toll of our mobility or endurance, that section of the list shrinks.  I still have a few travels on my list but the distances are shorter because getting there is rarely part of the fun. At the moment, my list includes New Orleans, Hawaii, Pittsburgh, the Canadian Maritime provinces, Iceland, Detroit, the Mississippi River and Costa Rica.  I have already had 20 years of semi-retirement and ten full retirement  years to travel to a lot of other places.

What other things besides places to go, things to see have you always wanted to do but haven’t yet? One item on my list was to write a book that was not a textbook (of which I wrote quite a few!) I am far from a bestseller, but after my retiring to semi-retirement, I have written one more textbook and six other books, all nonfiction—and there is at least one more in my head. I also, as you all know, write a blog. Perhaps you have a skill or talent that you would like to redirect or develop.  It the moment, I am trying to improve my gardening skills on by small but challenging yard in a part of the country where weeds and in particular kudzu are the designated enemies, and the growing season is nine long months.

As a retired professor, I am a big fan of lifelong learning. Most years I take on a learning project.  Last year it was upgrading my French with the aid of Babbel.  Before that it was a six-month study of Stoic philosophy followed by a long period of reading the works of four female Oxford philosophers who challenged the super-rational approach of their male colleagues. I have settled on my next project, which is to seek at least a rudimentary understanding of Quantum physics. My baggiest and longest project, though, was to go to seminary to study theological ethics, which was timely, expensive, and rewarding. I added a final degree, master off theological studies, to my resume.

None of those may appeal to you, but there are all kinds of non-academic learning from line dancing to photography to sketching to cooking to carpentry and lots of places to learn.  In my state, people over sixty can take college classes at state colleges tuition-free on a space available basis. OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning institute) is everywhere and offers short courses to older adults as well as opportunities to volunteer.  Volunteering is a great way to feel useful and make new friends.

One thing that many of us miss when we retire is the work community.  I’ve always been a community person—church, discussion groups, League of Women Voters—so my  is a good mix of engagement and downtime. My calendar was rarely blank. The later years  offer a good time to reconnect. For the first period of semi-retirement, I focused n more time traveling with grandchildren while they were still interested int traveling with their grandmother. More recently, I started traveling again with my college roommate, class of 1963!  Closer to hoe, there are arranged “dates” –hikes, lunch, walks in the park, local festivals, farmers’ markets–with old friends and newer ones.

Another challenge/opportunity that deserves some space on your bucket list is working with older people, often isolated by not being able to drive or other limitations. Every 9 am I check-in with my 90-year-old friend (we both live alone, and she is blind). It has been a joy of mutual discovery that there are still things we can learn from and about each other after 60 years of friendship.

Then there are the many other things you want to see, hear or understand.  I once took a creative writing class in which we were challenged to list 100 things we wanted to experience before we died.  The only item I remember from that list some 25 years ago was “Understand why Canada works.”  Haven’t checked that one off yet despite seven trips to Canada!