On Buckets with Holes

A Reflective Essay by Dr. Melissa Cain Travis

The thought I had upon waking today was the first line of an old nursery song that I haven’t heard in years—maybe dozens of years: “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.” It was the oddest thing, to mentally hear these words without prompting.

This afternoon, I had an early dinner with a friend at a local sushi bar where I delight in the visual experience of sushi but refuse to try any. This place is the kind that tends to attract stylish martini drinkers who’ve had too many cosmetic procedures and need to be out getting their money’s worth of attention. Cars that cost more than most houses line the curb out front.

There’s this expression, “a hole in their bucket.” Have you ever heard it? In certain contexts, it connotes the type of person who needs a constant stream of attention, because their attention bucket has a hole—a hole through which each ounce of attention leaks out soon after it goes in.

My sushi-eating friend is wise. She is full of the kind of wisdom that comes from decades of serious faith paired with the grief of early widowhood. She is brilliant, confident, and creative; she dreams of writing a novel. She listened as I described the pros and cons of two job possibilities that I’m weighing. At one point she said, “You’re telling me all the facts about these different positions, but you haven’t told me what you want in your next career move.”

She was right.

I explained that the question doesn’t quite… compute. The kind of career for which I prepared myself over a ten-year period is not an option for me now because of geographical limitations. I spent so much time and heart energy wanting that one thing. Now, being past the state of wanting is simply easier.

The truth of life is that we have to let some dreams die so that we can move on; but the bigger a Dead Dream is, the more likely it is to persist in the subconscious as the Spectre of Futility. Why should I want? What good does it do?

Did you know that the word “futility” comes from the latin word futilis, which means “leaky”? Like a bucket with a hole.

My father-in-law’s wife passed away a week ago. We did not know her well, mainly because of an 1100-mile separation. She was—to be frank—a difficult woman, one whose personality was forged in the hell of the mid-20th century foster-care system in the rural South. But while the horrors and the fears and the pains she endured as a child inflicted some wounds that never fully healed, those experiences also gave her a heart for vulnerable children. She created a quiet but astoundingly industrious ministry making quilted blankets and pillowcases to be distributed through various organizations around the world. Each blanket had a message on it: “Jesus loves me.” Not everyone knew that she sewed hundreds of these hugs-from-Jesus blankets, and we won’t know until the new creation how many lives were touched. When she learned of her prognosis about two years before she died, she prayed she would live to meet her first biological grandchild, who was in utero at the time. That was her big bucket-list item. I’m so glad it happened.

I guess because I’ve had mortality on my mind, as one does when someone in their circle departs, my Netflix movie selection for this evening was called The Life List. It’s about a young single woman who loses her mother. At the reading of her mother’s will, she is tasked with completing a “life list”—a list of things she had written down as an idealistic 13-year-old but still hadn’t done: perform stand up comedy at an open-mic night; learn to play “Clair de Lune” on the piano; make peace with her father; become a great teacher; get a tattoo; fall in love. Like a bucket list, but instead of things to do before she kicked the bucket, these were things her mother wanted her to do to finally start living.

Halfway into the film, I realized that the premise bore a striking resemblance to the real-life story of two of J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandsons, Royd and Mike. Royd tells the story in his personal memoir, There’s a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers. Mike was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and when he died, he left behind a bucket list for his brother. The very first assignment was for Royd to physically stumble on his way up to the lectern to deliver Mike’s eulogy! I have not yet read this book, only the synopsis. I had forgotten about it until today.

Was my waking brain weirdly prophetic, or what?

I think many people keep a mental bucket list. Mine is short because I only put HUGE items on it, like touring New Zealand and seeing the Hobbiton set from the Lord of the Rings films. I checked that off in July of last year.

As I was getting ready for bed this evening, looking forward to my husband’s arrival home tomorrow, I wondered why middle-aged and senior-aged people don’t ever talk about another kind of list, the kind that contains things your younger self was sure you would do at some point but are now impossible—or almost certainly so. I think this could be a very enriching exercise, a way to make peace with the “I will nevers” in a more gradual, gentle way. Maybe it could be called the Hole-in-the-Bucket List.

I will turn fifty in just under two years, unless I meet Jesus beforehand (we mortals are all leaky buckets filled with an unknown, finite quantity of water). My husband’s career prevents us from moving away from this vicinity. We are members of a newly planted church that we had prayed for over the past several years. We’ve just started building our empty-nest home, one big enough for the future grandchildren we hope to have but small enough to manage, should we be blessed to “age in place,” as they call it these days. As I’ve reflected on this coming season, my Hole-in- the-Bucket List has been gradually taking shape in my mind, and I think I’ll put it on paper tomorrow.

“I will never sit in a book-filled office with creaky wooden floors drinking tea and grading ancient philosophy essays on a campus filled with gothic architecture and surrounded by snow-capped mountains while listening to Yo-Yo Ma play ‘Cello Suite No. 1.’”

And that’s okay.

I wonder if I’ll be surprised by how long my list is. Or how short.

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—Melissa Cain Travis holds a PhD in Humanities (Philosophy) from Faulkner University's Great Books program and an MA in Science and Religion from Biola University. She is a Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, where she teaches adult education courses related to the intersection of science, faith, and philosophy. To learn more about her publications and academic interests, visit melissacaintravis.com.