Thoughts on The Bucket List

By Daniel Dessinger

August 1, 2008

Friday night. Just finished watching The Bucket List. I was expecting this to be one of those films that gets my wheels spinning. You know the kind. The ones that make you want to reevaluate your life and find more meaning in every waking moment and makes you kiss the bathroom floor out of gratefulness for the new day. That kind of stuff.

I give it a C. Yes, I had the self-evaluating thoughts. Yes, I’m sitting here writing about it now. But no, I was not moved to tears. And I was NOT challenged to live a more meaningful life. I love the actors. Maybe it was the execution. I’m not a director, so I don’t know what punch it lacked.

Still, to be fair, I am thinking about my life now, and how I can do things differently. Life is too short to waste on making money for making money’s sake. All my jillions of websites will all go away some day. CultureFeast may live on, but even that’s assuming too much at this point.

I cherish every moment spent with my baby girl. That is, unless she’s REALLY fussy. Then I’m less grateful. But I kiss her so often she gets tired of it. I’m so thrilled to have a daughter. I love on my wife, but not enough. She needs more of my time, and I need to give more of my time. I need to not be so focused on temporal crap.

This is all going away. It’s all aging and decomposing. Nothing is getting younger. Nothing gets newer. Time passes. People endure Time’s toll. And people die.

The young never like to talk about death. When it’s not a possibility, you live carelessly and without purpose. When time is limited, you seek to make the most of every breath like savoring every last drop of melted ice cream from the cone. We may never taste sugar again.

Every experience, every moment is like that. We may never taste sugar again.

Okay. Maybe a B.

View Comments for “Thoughts on The Bucket List”

Ashleigh says:
August 6, 2008 at 12:20 pm

Daniel, the never tasting sugar again comment reminds me of my mom as she was dying in 2006. She had colon cancer, so her diet slowly deteriorated. They kept trying to give her more solid foods, but inevitably, she’d be knocked back down to bland liquids, and toward the end, she couldn’t even keep that down. Anyway, during one of her more lucid moments, she commented, in her typically optimistic way, that when she got out of the hospital she couldn’t wait to go to Dairy Queen and get a MooLatte, their version of the frozen blended coffee. There have been many things that have made me think of my mom since she died two years ago (Jack Nicholson’s reaction to the chemo treatments in Bucket List would be one of them), but this is one of the saddest for me. She didn’t know when she went into the hospital for dehydration that she would never leave, of her own free will, again. I still get down, and I still get upset, but I really do try to realize that we really don’t know how numbered our days, hours and minutes are.

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