The Bucket List

We had the experience, but missed the meaning.

T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

In 1981 I visited a small town called Ste-Jamme-sur-Sarthe, about 20 km north of Le Mans. I was chatting to the local garage owner, Jean-Pierre, when an old man walked in and started speaking what sounded like French gobbledegook. I listened in some confusion as he and Jean-Pierre conversed for a while in this strange tongue. When he had gone, the garage man laughed at me. “Ah, he was just speaking the local dialect; no wonder you couldn't understand him. But you know what? That guy has never been to Le Mans.” Never been to Le Mans?!!! I was dumbfounded. This elderly man had spent his whole life in the area around Ste Jamme, not venturing the 20 kilometres into his local town, let alone the 200 km to Paris, or anywhere else. I thought this was a thing of the past - maybe 100 years ago, when travel was much harder, but surely not now.

I wonder what this stubborn old Frenchman would make of the world of 2016: our obsession with travel, our constant movement back and forth between countries and continents, the cult of the selfie: me in front of the Vatican, us in front of the White House (now Trump Tower 2), all those people swarming over Angkor Wat. How would he react to this cult of seeing new places and undergoing new experiences?

I don't think he'd be very impressed. And I don't think he would follow Morgan Freeman and make a list of things to do before he kicked the bucket. You wouldn't find him thumbing the pages of 1000 Places to See Before You Die and 1000 Foods to Eat Before You Die, or visiting one of many websites dedicated to creating the perfect bucket list. He probably wouldn't be too interested in swimming with sharks, skiing in the Antarctic, learning to play the didgeridoo, or piloting an A380.

I suppose you could try to convince him that we live on a planet rich in interesting places and full of opportunities, and that it seems a little rude and ungrateful to leave so much of all that untasted and untried. Obviously, Monsieur, we can’t do it all, but let’s at least make a start. Otherwise we won’t be making the most of what’s on offer, and that would be terrible.

Would it?

I’m reminded of another local village person: Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Whereas Hercule Poirot was an experienced man of the world, accustomed to travelling on the Orient Express and so on, Jane Marple rarely left her village of St Mary Mead: but she picked up all she needed to know about human nature by careful observation of her fellow villagers - and presumably of herself.

It’s not particularly clever to use a fictional character to prop up an argument, but I do think Christie was on to something: there is more interest to be found in the inner voyage, the exploration of our own humanity and that of those around us, than there is in going to see the Eiffel Tower or the Niagara Falls. Shrewd under his peasant’s beret, sticking to St Jamme like a limpet, our old Monsieur might turn out to be an extraordinarily sharp judge of human character, or even an intrepid explorer of his own inner world (doubtful, but not impossible…) Perhaps his well-travelled grandchildren are now better informed than him, and possibly more fulfilled as human beings - or maybe not. They might just have become modern bores, constantly wanting to show you pictures of their latest trip to Ibiza on their phones.

Over the past couple of years I’ve frequently been asked, particularly by my students at King’s College, whether I have a bucket list. My standard answer has been “No, I don’t believe in bucket lists. I’ve never been to the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramid, or the Grand Canyon - and I don’t give a tinker’s cuss about all that. Doing those things wouldn’t make me a better person. Knowing me, it would make me worse, because I would want to show off about it.”

Of course, after having spent half a lifetime living in other countries myself, there is no way I can claim any morally superior high ground here. And in fact I don’t want to suggest there is anything wrong with setting goals to improve your life by learning and giving and travelling. In other words, if you have a bucket list, don’t let me, or the man from Ste Jamme, pour cold water over it. It may be exactly what you need to give your life some direction and drive. But for me, it’s no longer the way I’m thinking.

In fact, after a while I started to say to the students “You are my bucket list. I can’t think of anything I want to do more than sitting with talented young people talking about what matters most in life.” (This was absolutely true; I was lucky enough to be teaching Philosophy and French literature, both of which used to lead on to fascinating discussions and exchanges. I used to pinch myself and say “I’m being paid for this?”)

Right now illness has forced me away from teaching, and I’m faced once more with the question: what do I do with this remaining time? And certainly for me there are some obvious answers that wouldn’t necessarily feature on your Morgan Freeman bucket list: draw as close as possible to my family and to other people that I love; pay close attention to the friendships that matter deeply to me; maintain rich relationships with those around me. That’s all the people stuff, and it’s totally central.

But there’s something else that seems to be coming up: the exploration of the inner world. This has always been something of a mystery for me. As a clergyman, I was surprisingly bad at personal prayer, and never developed much depth in meditation or contemplation. I would get off to a start with some new technique, and then grow tired of it after a week or two. Over time, my notion of God altered, and while I began to realise more and more that I needed to explore the notion of Immanence, the God within, I didn’t go out of my way to read some of the writers who could have helped me: mystics like Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, St Theresa, or more modern contemplatives such as Thomas Merton. The Baptist tradition in which I grew up tended to reduce prayer to a set of formulae and requests rather than encouraging a journey into Self and into the Ground of your being, as Paul Tillich famously put it. Then there is a whole Eastern tradition of mysticism and meditation, of which I remain fearfully ignorant.

What I have done from time to time over the past twenty years is to consult various professional counsellors, psychologists, psychotherapists and the like, to explore what makes me tick - or not tick. In fact since the beginning of the year I have been seeing a Jungian therapist here in Auckland, and this has been really helpful. Jung once said “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” If we translate this into 2016 terms, he is saying that many people allow themselves to be tranquillised or anaesthetised by the surrounding culture of entertainment and consumerism; in other words, the Kardashians, “Game of Thrones” and your Facebook feed have put you to sleep. I couldn't agree more. And according to Jung, the way to resist these lethal soporifics and wake yourself up is to embark on a scary journey to the heart of yourself. Then you will truly awake to reality.

So, with this in mind, I am exploring with my therapist, not only some of the personal issues I still struggle with, but also some ways of undertaking this inner journey myself. Part of the process involves a realisation that many of the "outside" things that I have felt were important don’t actually matter, and need to be discarded. He said to me a few weeks ago “You need to realise that you are not important, and that it is not important that you are not important”. Wow - I’m still letting those words sink in. “Being important” - cultivating a reputation, holding a position of responsibility, being recognised and valued and respected - is not necessarily a disadvantage, but it’s not what I should be aiming for, or valuing most of all. So what really is important? That’s what I want to find out.

At the moment, like the old man from Ste Jamme, I’m staying put, geographically at least, and it's the inward journey that has grabbed my attention. It's a journey tinged with hope, however much or little time I have to pursue it. I’m experimenting with some meditation techniques, and I’m continuing with therapy. I'm just a beginner and what I'm doing seems very inadequate - but it'll have to do for now.

Let's call it my "drop-in-the-bucket" list.

The only journey is the one within.

Rainer Maria Rilke