Live for 'Today'

A year or so back I was challenged to produce a list of 15 things that I would really like to do or to achieve in my life. I've still only got five and one of those is under review -do I really want to do it or is it simply doing duty for somthing deeper? So the page referred to in this article got my interest. Basically you are presented with a list of 50 possible things to do before you die [you have a date in mind?] and you are to choose 5. I found five from that list quite hard. Most of the things were a bit ho-hum and more than that most of them were so trivial and consumerist: where are the things like 'write a book' or 'paint a picture' or 'modify a house to be more ecologically sound', or 'plant a church' [both on my my possibles list], or 'learn how to grow organic food', or 'build houses for homeless labourers in Mexico', or ... well you get the point: where were the things that challenge people to grow as human beings and to leave the world a better place. Most of the list was tourism of various kinds. It represents a disturbing shrinkage of the imagination to be bounded by the travel brochures. It looks like they just said in the office "We need a list of 50 things to do before you die, what we got?" and a whole load of people who hadn't really given it much thought came up with a whole load of ideas of things that they'd seen advertised or heard of someone else doing and had thought 'That sounds nice', and that's what they said.

I'd love to challenge them to push it further and do an investigation on say, what life coaches discover about people's hopes, dreams and ambitions and use those things as a basis for a poll. I guess though, it'd be harder to tie in with advertisers. It's easy to find advertisers to fund the programme when all you need to do is get travel agents and the like on the case.

One of the things I come across in life coaching is the need to help people cross the consumerist ad-formed imagination boundary and get in touch with the deeper things that motivate and change. There's something of spiritual direction in that too [Yeah and I'll plug my MA again, some of which deals with that stufff]
Live for 'Today' | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist Magazine