The Wish List
Now that I’ve seen The Bucket List and subsequently seen dozens of people’s bucket lists popping up here and there, I’m now noticing another format to the Living To-Do List—the Wish List. My aunt, who was reading a fictional book by the same title, told me about her own Wish List.
“Your wish list?” I asked, thinking it would be things to buy at Wal-Mart or things for my husband to do, like rearrange furniture. “Things to buy or things to do?”
“Things to do,” she told me, and showed me a list of twenty things she’d like to do—ranging from picnicking at the local park to seeing so many movies in a theater.
Ahh. A Living To-Do List! I was pretty excited to see that she’d started her own—I’m a bit proponent of people making their own lists—and it got me thinking about a book I’d bought when I was in the hospital called The Wish List.
By Barbara Ann Kipfer, this book contains nothing but a gigantic list of things to check off that you may wish to do in your life. I’ve checked off something on every page, so you know that much of it is pretty basic—from bartering to spending a day browsing the library, playing the accordian to learning three good jokes, being there for a baby’s first step to creating your own web page, there’s definitely stuff that anyone can do—as well as things that you likely already want to do. So don’t let skill level or any other nonsense prevent you from picking up this book.
There are also some pretty off-the-charts things that you’ll likely never really get to do—like have Bruce Springsteen perform at your birthday party (I wish!), meet the Dalai Lama, see a mountain gorilla in the wild or publish a breakthrough scientific breakthrough—but they can still be considered dreams, right? So go ahead and write them in, and who knows? Maybe they’ll come true. They’re not exactly impossible, after all.
Every page or so also contains several blank lines to add your own items, which made me think that this is the perfect workbook for anyone wishing to create their own list. You can use ideas from the book, jot down a few of your own, and even use it as your own Bucket List, Wish List, or Living To-Do List if the idea of blank paper terrifies you.
