The What-If Bucket List Game

I wouldn’t exactly recommend “7 Pounds,” Will Smith’s current feature film. I wouldn’t exactly recommend “The Bucket List” with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, either. For different reasons, they aren’t films that I would list among my favorites. That said, I watched both within the past few days, and each offered something that made me think.

The whole premise of “The Bucket List” is this: two terminally ill strangers decide to embark on a journey to cross off as many items as possible from a “bucket list,” a list of things each would like to accomplish before they die. The concept got me thinking, as was obviously the intent of the film: why wait until death approaches before creating your own bucket list? My oldest son has such a list in his head. It’s the list of things he wants to do and places he’d like to go. I think we all create those lists as kids. We just tuck them away in a corner of our spiritual attics as we get older. Time to dust mine off.

In “7 Pounds,” Will Smith plays a character who is obviously haunted by something that happened in his past, and, as the film unfolds, he plays “guardian angel” to complete strangers. One of those is a character played by Rosario Dawson. During a conversation, she asks him to play a game with her. She calls it “What if…?” The intent was for the two characters to share wild, far-fetched dreams with one another. This scene, too, got me thinking” why not play that game with myself, with my wife, with my children? Why not find out their dreams and share mine? When we share our innermost thoughts and feelings with others, there is a certain accountability that comes from that reveal. When we speak the dream, we own it. It immediately shifts from fantasy to possibility…even though it was a possibility all along. Time to own some of my dreams.

So, I offer up a game for consideration: The What-If Bucket List Game. The purpose of this game is to create a list of dreams that you want to see come true. Share the list. Reveal those dreams. Own them. Be outrageous. Be creative. Dare yourself to be precisely the person you dream that you can be. Along the way, someone might take notice and have the courage to play the game themselves. What if…?