I’ve always seen life as a conveyor belt. When we’re young, everyone’s ahead of us. As we get older, we start to see that the line behind us is longer than the line in front of us. It’s sobering. But that’s not a bad thing, because the reality is, we all reach our demise, and it makes the time we have here that much more precious.
For much of my life, I aspired to become more at peace with myself and more comfortable with myself and to become a better performer, better singer, better writer. At an early age, dreaming about being a good father was not in the cards. We can realize things like that only when they’re close enough to see and feel. There are also times when we have to accept what we won’t be able to do, and that’s important. There’s peace in being pragmatic enough to look at life and say, “Well, these are things I would love to do or do again, but other things are more of a priority for me at this moment in life.”
We tend to look too far into the future when we’re not equipped to have an answer. There is no ultimate goal or destination, because whether or not we reach our goal, the journey there fills us with new possibilities. We can only define ourselves today, and part of the joy of life is knowing that we will define ourselves differently in the future. That’s the excitement of self-discovery.
Life is long, and in the grand scheme of things, anything we accomplish is just an opportunity to accomplish something else—something more, something better. It doesn’t mean that any given accomplishment isn’t important. It just means that it’s of a certain moment. It’s what we did today. But what will we do tomorrow? If we are truly motivated and if we truly value ourselves and see the potential in our lives, that thirst is never quenched. That hunger is never filled. Because it’s not just a need; it’s what makes life valuable.
At this point in my life, all of the amazing creative outlets I have make me feel good. I’d like to say they make me feel young, but that wouldn’t be accurate—because I didn’t have them when I was young. I had to get older to have access to them and the ability to see them. Painting, theater, writing books, my musical side project Soul Station. I find happiness in much more mundane outlets too, like simply being a dad or cooking up a delicious family dinner.
One of the keys to all of this: I kicked the bucket list.
We often make a fundamental mistake when talking about a bucket list: a bucket list should always be expanding based on our experiences, not getting shorter. If we’re slowly checking off items on our list without adding new items, we’re doing it wrong. You could say I have only one item on my bucket list: never to reach the end of my bucket list.
Because achieving something on our bucket list should open our eyes to something else we need to do. I don’t think we should ever end up with everything checked off our list, regardless of how content we are with what we’ve accomplished. I achieved all I originally set out to do—I attained fame and fortune as the rock star I’d always dreamed of becoming. But in my case, that was far from the end of the story—thank goodness!
I’ve realized that I’m just as happy about discovering new items for my bucket list as I am about checking one off. In fact, that’s the real excitement in life. The excitement is in discovery. And we can have the same sense of awe and joy in discovery as an adult that we had as children. In fact, the excitement is more pronounced for me now, in my sixties, than it was when I was younger, when I was too rigid in my thinking. If you’re missing that, then you’re not living your life fully. If your day is filled with the expected, then you need to open the curtains.
I started off by thinking life had a limited scope. It’s easy to picture life like a TV screen and believe it’s a certain size. Then experience shows us that it’s actually the size of a movie screen, and then, hopefully, it reveals itself as the size of an IMAX screen. Life should be a series of panels opening to make our world bigger, because what we let into our lives and how we perceive and experience it defines who we are. And I should emphasize, who we are for ourselves.
I’m much more aware of who I am today. I’m as aware today of who I am as I was clueless about who I was in earlier years. As the picture grows bigger, we have to step farther back to be able to see the complexity of who we are.
Of course, it’s still worthwhile focusing on specific goals. To try another metaphor, we can think of goals as tiles. We want to add tiles, sure, but we don’t want to just stack them up. We want to lay them out and use them to create a mosaic that can represent the richness of our life. We need to make sure that these tiles assemble into something larger—the complete picture of our life. As we create this mosaic, it should necessitate our stepping farther and farther back to see the whole picture, to see its enormous size and the intricacy of it. At that point, we should also see the potential to fill in more: self-discovery should lead to more self-discovery.
Nothing brings me more contentment than knowing who I am and knowing that I’m more than I thought I could be.
I’ll tell you something else: as with much art—and certainly with rock and roll music—even the imperfections are part of it. There’s no such thing as mistakes. Tunnel vision is fine in our quest to accomplish something, but we should always be aware that any given accomplishment is not the end. It’s part of this much larger picture.
Not only does this kind of approach—having a broader vision of ourselves and the world—make us more interesting at, say, a party, but it can contribute to the back and forth between all the various pursuits we engage in: we raise everything we do by raising anything we do. Not to mention, we’re more engaging in our own heads. We like ourselves more. We enjoy ourselves more when we like who we are, and liking who we are is based on liking what we do and—especially—how we do it.