TABLE OF CONTENTS BEFORE THE BUCKET

Introduction:

Who we are, how the book works, and why we wrote it.

IN THE BUCKET

Seven ways to lighten and enlighten your life:

1: Chucket—Dump the stuff you don’t need or want.

2: Shucket—Keep what’s important but distill it.

3: Ducket—Dodge demands that others throw at you.

4: Fucket—Trash what no longer works for you.

5: Plucket—Grasp the sweets that life still offers.

6: Trucket—Walk your talk and follow your dreams.

7: Tucket—Tell yourself what’s working in your life.

BEYOND THE BUCKET Epilogue:

Beyond the …ucket Lists. Stay in touch.

Notes:

Attributions, Contributions, and Sources

Who we are and how that led to this book Before going forward, you might want to know more about who we are and why we are doing what we do. Throughout the book you will find bits that are directly from our own experience. Sometimes we write as both of us—and then we use the pronoun “we” to indicate that. Other times we write as individuals—and then we use the pronoun

“I” to indicate that. So you know who the “I” is, we put a small favorite beastie at the beginning of each “I” section. George’s wee beastie is the little crocodile—

reminiscent of Schnappi in a German children’s song. Walt is a great fan of both Jim Henson and Kermit (Jim Henson’s Muppet creation of Sesame Street fame)19 so naturally his wee beastie is a frog. Yup, kid stuff, but note, we are not in our second childhood; rather, we are still in our first—puer aeternus in what we hope is the best

sense of those words: ever playful. And yup, adult stuff: these avatars are serious as well as playful. They are our totem animals with all sorts of meaning for us. Just as an example, both avatars are amphibious—which fits with how both of us move among different cultures in our lives and in our work.

As a “we” with two “I’s” we will tell you stories from our shared experience and our individual experience. We will also tell you stories that others have shared with us. And we will offer you some ways to go forward from those stories. So let’s begin.

“Schnappi” & “Frog” in real life

Small Boy He picked up a pebble and threw it into the sea. And another, and another. He couldn’t stop. He wasn’t trying to fill the sea. He wasn’t trying to empty the beach. He was just throwing away, nothing else but.

Like a kitten playing he was practising for the future when there’ll be so many things he’ll want to throw away if only his fingers will unclench and let them go.

Norman MacCaig38

1: The Chucket List

Years ago both of us learned to travel lightly as backpackers, enlightened by what became our hiking bible: The Complete Walker39 by Colin Fletcher, who even recommended shortening and drilling out the handle of your toothbrush! Fletcher’s dictum was simple: “You look after the ounces and

the pounds will look after themselves.” So too while wandering through life, as Cesare Pavese put it, “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light.”40 However, the little voice that says, “might need that” has often nagged us. When the two of us went to Siberia in 2007 to do a training course on a River Lena cruise ship for our Russian clients, we flew six hours on beyond Moscow with five laptops, five

A younger backpacking Walt

flipchart easels, and several boxes of other training supplies. We were more than a bit embarrassed to read Urszula Muskus in The Long Bridge talking about what kept her going during sixteen years in the gulags in the 1940s and 1950s. Her advice on what to take when exiled to Siberia: “something to eat and knitting needles.”41 Both of us are currently doing lots of Chucket work (clearing our living spaces and working spaces) while we develop our suggestions for you. With luck, some of our ideas will be helpful to you. And, the best Chucket approach will be the one that you create for yourself as you focus on doing it yourself. In the words of Havelock Ellis: “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”42 Distasteful as it may at first seem, ageing brings with it a sense of mortality—death feels every day closer than it was yesterday, even though it may be a few decades away. Of course many younger than ourselves will leave life sooner than we do, but it is the awareness that our limited time is passing, not the exact number of years or days that we reckon with. What nicer gift to our heirs than to relieve them of the burden of deciding about what to do with our hoarded junk. We could even give them some of the stuff that we no longer need so they can start using it now.

Shucket: Get to the heart of the matter. Peel off the unneeded, the distracting, the useless. Shucking is not chucking. It is usually a bit more work. It may be taxing or tedious at first, but it is necessary and ultimately gratifying when we bring clean results to the table of life. Shucking may surprise us by revealing a feast that has been imprisoned by the husks of the superfluous. Not all Shucket is physical—much of it is in the head and the heart, as Walt says below in a grook—a playful kind of poetry invented by Piet Hein.56

Sometimes I tidy my shelf Sometimes I tidy my self

Tidying outside stuff is shelfish Tidying inside stuff is selfish

But sometimes I tell my self To focus on self instead of shelf

It’s not enough to clear our shelves We need to clear our selves

Things are not what they seem Pulling off the husks from everyday nostrums or “accepted wisdom” for the first time may bring to light shining realities that

were hidden beneath the crusts of the social constructs that defined and limited our experience of them. I recently saw a picture of

a mirror, with a note attached to it that read, “Reflections in this mirror may be distorted by socially constructed ideas of ‘beauty’.” In other words, even my self-image, my self-acceptance, can be distorted by commonly accepted judgments in my culture or group, or by the way that the products that are supposed to make me look good are marketed. A recent cartoon showed a woman asking a man, “Do I look fat?” His mumbled response: “Do I look crazy?” Beauty is often suffocated by its clothing and there is a price to be paid sometime for revealing it, for telling the truth.

Someone once said, “All art is obscene.” The author meant that in the etymological sense of the word. Skene, in Greek, is the tent cloth that hides something within. Good art pulls off the wrappings of the everyday in such a way as to unclothe its true shape, form, beauty. I can’t visit Disneyland without going away with the song line, “Everything is beautiful in its own way…” repeating itself in my head. Shucket is finding my way back to basics. Talmudic traditions argue over the nature of the Klippoth, shells that encase and hide sparks of divine power but which need to be broken open for creative energy to be released. As one master put it, it is the responsibility of each human being to deal with whatever comes to him or her in life, creation and its creatures, in such a way that the light and beauty and possibilities contained may be revealed and released. Taking this philosophy to heart, Shucket becomes the modus operandi of the enlightened man, the artist at life, whatever the faith that guides him to it. When we introduced Chucket, we quoted the Italian poet Cesare Pavese to say, “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light.” Yup, we need to keep the pounds and ounces of material reality from holding us back, but even more importantly, as Pavese puts it in the next line, there are other kilos and grams that can be even more weighty: “Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears… the closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.”57 Shucket!

REFLECTION What of my old attitudes, worldviews, thinking patterns need cleaning up? What beliefs or mindsets help you go beneath the surface and see what you may have missed?

Seven Questions about your Bucket List

Before you get too upset with the idea of a Fucket List (or too delighted—most of the people we’ve shared this with seem to love the idea), let me reassure you that I do think it’s fine if you also have a Bucket List. I just have seven (as usual!) challenging questions—for

myself as well as for you—as I review the items I might find on my Bucket List.

1. Why haven’t I done this already? 2. When is enough enough? 3. How much is enough? 4. What am I trying to prove? 5. Who am I trying to impress? 6. Who says I have to do this? 7. Who cares what other people think?

The Fucket List