Bucket List

Someone recently asked me while discussing the recent Everest news if seeing Tibet was on my bucket list.  It's definitively something I want to do but I think I've passed over the bucket list concept a few times over.  I've read more than enough mountaineering books and treks through the Himalayas to provide plenty of food for my very over active imagination.  Reinhold Messner's solo ascents of all the big fourteen had me yearning for a little challenge of my own, and I took up rock and ice climbing quite seriously, with a grade five first ascent to my name in the Thunder Bay area; Red Rock Revival.  You can look it up.  But to be quite frank, I've checked pretty much everything on whatever bucket list I may have had, some items many times over.  I still haven't driven a Porsche 911, but pretty much everything else has been checked and then some.  I've done plenty more than even my imagination had yearned for, just going with the flow and no doubt being a little lucky.  I never really actively pursued a list, but if something presented itself, I always went for it.  Often to my detriment but I don't regret a second.  Always go for it.  Grow a pair, take a risk. 

I don't think I'm overly reckless.  My job certainly doesn't allow for reckless behaviour, and I certainly wouldn't have made it as far as I have if I were.  I am prepared.  I know the rules and I follow them.  I know the aircraft.  I know the procedures.  I study.  I review.  I prepare. I self examine and reassess.  I don't see any reckless behaviour at all but more than a few people comment that I'm pretty far out there when they hear that I'm flying a search and rescue helicopter and living in East Africa.  It's knowing what you can handle and that only comes from pushing oneself, getting out of one's comfort zone.  I didn't make the cover of the Globe & Mail (Canada's National Newspaper) for surfing in a hurricane due to reckless behaviour.  I started out in three foot slop, surfed hard and heavy and worked my way up to being comfortable slinging my short board on eight and nine foot days, and I surfed and surfed and eventually got to the point were I was extremely comfortable paddling out into eighteen foot plus swells, the really heavy days on Canada's East Coast, knowing when I could handle the strong currents and more importantly, knowing when to bail.

 

Hoping not to come across sounding too preachy, but life is meant to be lived.  Bucket list.  I just want to be sitting in my rocking chair in my eighties thinking back, with a big smile on my face. 

 

Back to Tanzania in a week.......

 

http://www.mountainproject.com/v/red-rock-revival/106221558  (FA = First Ascent)