The Journey is not about the destination. It is not about any of the destinations. It is about The Journey. It is about savoring all you learn and experience along the way. A destination is just another micro-journey. One where you will continue to wander and grow and learn.
The "Bucket List" isn't about showing the world your accomplishments, as if to say "Look what I did before I died." No, it is all about cataloging the things you wish to learn, and then things you learned. It is all about having experiences, embracing them and bring them into the fabric of your own being, and then sharing them to some degree with others.
This reminds me of my first bucket list. As a creative personality I am always scribbling things down. My desks are usually littered with hundreds of little post-it-notes or things scribbled hastily on torn-out pages of small notebooks. Ideas, and dreams. Characters and inventions. Places of the imagination. Coordinates in a game. Lists of spells and incantations both literary and in games. Things I dream up and things I collect from others. Places I want to go, things I want to create. Languages I want to learn. Favorite poets. Favorite colors. Colors in other languages where they have a certain glow that they seem to lack in English. Ideas for recipes. Recipes for ideas. Lists of things needed to brew beer or make wine or make a cake.
Once upon a time I grew frustrated with the clutter of these tiny notes on my desk and had a thought: "I will collect all of these and throw them into a bucket. Then any time I am searching for an idea about anything, I will scrounge around in the bucket a little."
I collected my notes, my ideas and dreams for a couple of years in my bucket. This was my first bucket list. It wasn't a list of things I wanted to do before I kicked the bucket, it was a bucket of lists. A bucket of things in nearly every category you could imagine.
Then one day someone who shouldn't have been cleaning my office dumped my whole bucket into the trash. I didn't discover it for several days and it was already too late. The trash had already gone out to the street corner and been picked up by the Waste Management people.
I was upset of course, but I didn't take out my anger on anyone, because when I looked at that bucket, it really did look pretty foul and I could see how someone might have thought it was just a rubbish bin. I decided to repurpose that bucket, perhaps even use it as a waste bin. And to keep my ideas and dreams someplace else.
Don't throw your ideas and dreams into a waste bucket, or something that looks like a waste bucket.
So much to say, this is the real bucket list. It is a collection of your dreams.
I always thought the idea of a bucket list was stupid. People should be able to do what they want all the time and not waste time with such things. But a few years back I realized that I had aspirations for a few things that would take some time in planning and saving to bring to pass. So, I started my first official bucket list, that I called a bucket list, and thought of as a bucket list. It generally centered around places I wanted to go before I died.
I didn't want to go to these places simply so I could say I had gone to these places. I wanted to go there because they were things that invoked in me the deep hallows of my dreams. I always found the city of Venice enchantingly beautiful. La Serenissima, floating on the water like a dream. I had always been mystically drawn to the Azore Islands, because that's where my ancestors came from. I put these places as the first places on my bucket list.
I would have to say that is when The Journey began. I have always put a great deal of forethought and planning into every major thing I have done, whether it is writing a novel, creating a song, making a movie or even a short video, I study and I research and I learn everything I can about anything that can possibly be related to my dream.
My family members, and those who have stayed my my family, over the years would recognize that I have always planned the most elaborate vacations. We have traveled to every stretch of the coast of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, and with every trip we have always seen and done a host of new things.
I did something similar years ago when I travelled to Russia. The host family who sponsored me was amazed that I already knew the whole layout of Moscow, and where all the famous authors and poets had been born, lived, died and been buried. I also had a pretty good grasp of the Russian language before I traveled. The travel book that I studied as I planned was written entirely in Russian.
As I began to plan my trip to Venice I did something similar, and this part of the journey has grown and grown into something more than I originally imagined. I started with a Rick Steves travel guide to Venice. Then I got his Rick Steve's Italian phrase book. After getting a pretty good grasp of his Italian phrases I deiced that I actually wanted to really learn Italian and not just memorize a bunch of phrases, that I didn't really understand the mechanics of.
That blossomed. Eventually I downloaded about 5 different phone apps for learning Italian (I'm down to just 4 now), and that grew into "wanting to find some Italians I could chat with and try and learn more."
It helped that we were having a pandemic and I was at home all of the time.
My initial search for a way to talk with Italians was pretty fruitless, but eventually I found the livestream chats on Youtube, where I could chat with and learn from Italians in a chat textbox, and then I found Bigo Live where I could chat with Italians while they livestreamed, and even face to face. The journey was spreading. On both of these apps right away I started meeting people in a lot of other countries too. After a year and a half of chatting on youtube, and a year of chatting and watching broadcasts on Bigo Live a lot has changed. A lot.
Right away I started picking up a lot of Spanish and a lot of Portuguese. That hadn't been a part of my plan, but Spanish is always nice to know in the USA (my next door neighbors are Mexicans) and Portuguese would always be nice to know when I visit the Azores someday.
I forgot to mention Thailand. Thailand was the first place that I put on my bucket list because of two things: beautiful architecture and temples, and elephants!
Fast forward and after a year and a half of becoming friends with foreigners, all of the following has changed:
* I've made pretty good friends in Venice, and in other parts of Northern Italy (Milano and Torino) who I hope to visit with when I get there.
* I've also made friends in Rome, Naples, Sicily, Sardegna, Liguria, Umbria, Calabria, Puglia and Basilicata. Yes, did you know they had a region named after ME! :D
* I've also made friends in the upper Rhone Valley in France, in the Galicia and Andalusia regions of Spain.
* Made quite a bunch of friends in Brazil and most of my Portuguese experience comes with chatting and talking with them. I actually spent one of my new years eves at a virtual "beach party" near Rio di Janeiro (online) Nobody in Portugal yet, although Galicia is close.
* For some reason most of the Spanish speaking friends I have made are in Colombia, but a couple are in Venezuela and Mexico too.
* I've made friends in Thailand, Malaysia, and a whole bunch of friends in Indonesia (now also on my bucket list). A few in the Philippians, and a few scattered other places across Europe.
* I now know quite a number of people in all of those places. I follow their lives and they follow mine. Quite a number of places have been added to my bucket list, in varying degrees, but I certainly hope to take to trip to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia someday and another to South America. This is in addition to my Rhone Valley France trip and my southern Italy trip.
* for a while I studied Spanish and Portuguese with my Italian studies but this was too difficult. They have so many similarities that I would keep getting things mixed up in Italian, and since Italy is the first place I plan to visit, I didn't want to mess up my potential with Italian, so I set aside the others (limiting myself just to the basic greetings). Instead I added Indonesian to my language studies, and there is the bonus that Malay is nearly identical to bahasa Indonesia. In fact Wikipedia says Indonesian is a Malay dialect.
Making friends with people on social media can have a sad aspect. Sometimes someone will vanish without a trace and you never hear from them again. In one case, one friend who vanished like that, we (our collective online group) were able to figure out that he died. But fortunately many of my new online friends I have now on more than one social media account. So if they delete their accounts one place there is always the chance I can find them and follow up with their lives in another place.
This is The Journey. But this is not all. In addition to making new friends and learning languages I am also reading about the history, culture, art and religion of many new places. I've picked up and read quite a few new poets and playwrights, listened to some interesting new music in a vast number of genres, and read about the strangest episodes of history. Marco Polo is a favorite example. I picked him up and started reading him as part of my Italian studies until he got to Sumatra (the largest island in the North West portion of Indonesia which has more than 20,000 islands). I lost interest here, but that was before Indonesia was a part of my life. I plan to circle back to Marco Polo and resume with him on Sumatra.
As a connoisseur of many things, everyone wants to share their food and drink with me. So, I've learned a lot of new cocktails from my friends in northern Italy, and even video-blogged about some of them. I've learned that Thai people DO use chopsticks but only on noodles - it is too hard with rice. I now feel much better about all the years I asked for chopsticks at Thai restaurants. Oh, and by the way did you know that Phad Thai was invented by the Chinese but later became so popular in Thailand that it became their national dish? Also, that bottle of Siracha you have may be made in San Francisco, but Siracha actually comes from the city of Siracha in Thailand.
Lastly, we were all taught somewhere (perhaps by the zookeepers at our local zoos) that there are two kinds of Elephants, African and Indian. But actually, there are seven distinct kinds of Elephants, and the "Asian Elephant (which you find in Thailand and the Maylay peninsula is distinct from the Indian Elephant. Three of the distinct varieties are those living on the island of Sri Lanka, those living on the Island of Sumatra (part of Indonesia) and those living on Borneo (an island shared by the countries of Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia).
Did you know that you can go onto google street view in Thailand and see elephants crossing the road?
All a part of the journey folks, and it makes sense that I got here from Venice, when you consider that Marco Polo brought the Venetian empire to the south pacific, and Sumatra specifically before Columbus had discovered America.
Another fun fact: it is widely recognized that the numbers of elephants in Sumatra are declining, due to loss of habitat. But if you check with any organization that actually counts elephants, the estimated elephant population of Sumatra has actually been climbing! Why is that? How can that be? It is because much of the Island of Sumatra is still completely unexplored. Can you imagine that? A place on our own planet, not at the bottom of the ocean, that nobody has yet explored! Sadly, it is only becoming explored as the agricultural industries for coffee and palm oil (mostly palm oil) expand their deforestation of Sumatra. In Sumatra the problem they have with poaching of elephants is not for their tusks, it is largely farmers trying to protect their crops.
And yet, one of Marco Polo's first places to explore was Sumatra where he stayed for nearly a year and a half while his ships were being repaired.
This is the journey.
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