28 and counting…

so, here’s my problem: i want to do everything. ok, not everything, but pretty much everything. there are in fact a million things i want to learn to do well. for the purposes of this post i’ll stick with active stuff like hiking, biking, soccer, basketball, running, climbing, surfing, kayaking, tennis, swimming, dancing, trampoline basketball(?), etc, etc. there are similar lists for places i want to go/live, jobs/skills i want to learn, and various other categories.

after i finished college i decided that a bucket list was in order so that i could attack all of this “wanting to do” with some form of organization. the beauty of this idea was that it made me plan (…which i am not good at doing). for example i was able to knock off “run a marathon” and got a pretty good start on “hike the AT” because i decided that one of the “big ones” would get checked off each year, and planned and trained accordingly.

wait, what’s the problem? back when i came up with this plan, i knew than things like the first two i mentioned (marathon & AT) should go early in the countdown because at some point my body was going to fall apart. given the years of diving on the ground from my time between goalposts on a soccer field and continuous activity from various other sports in my youth, my assumption is that at some point my knees, hips, ankles, pick your part, will give out and the more strenuous activities will go along with. therefore i’ve chosen to leave things like “scuba-dive”, and all the other really low impact things, until later in life.

again, problem? well, this year i’ve sprained an ankle, jammed a thumb so bad that it’s taken several months to recover, jammed a toe in similar fashion, and as of this week went kayaking and smashed an elbow into a concrete fake river bottom at the manmade whitewater center in charlotte. i never used to get hurt, and when i did it took no time to recover, and as i sat in my little room at the hospital where my dad works a couple of days ago waiting for my x-ray results to come back i began to think that scuba-diving is coming on way faster than i thought. there’s still so much to get done. when the doc walked in and said no break, i was excited, but i also realized that some re-prioritizing may need to happen on my list because there’s just not enough time in life to do it all. (insert moral of the story here with something like: “that goes for the rest of life too.”) for now i’m good to keep on trucking, but there’s no telling how long those x-rays are going to keep coming back the way i want them to.