Bliss List, the Everyday Joys You Look Forward To

Writer and editor Gwen Moran has a helpful newsletter called Bloom Anywhere, and recently in it she described going for chemo treatments at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Manhattan Breast Cancer Treatment Center. She writes that she was telling her oncologist how she needed to get going on her bucket list.

And then she writes, he stopped and looked me in the eye. We don’t say that here, he said. Try a different name for it. And she thought for a moment and then said, okay, how about I need to get going on my bliss list? And he said much better.

And his point was that a bucket list suggests those big things that you want to do before you kick the bucket, before you pass on. But reframing your thinking as having a bliss list involves lots of smaller steps toward a goal.

And as Moran explains, in many cases, the very process of accomplishing what’s on our bliss lists is a big part of the bliss itself, you know, taking pleasure in the little things, the small moments along the way.

And you know, Grant, thinking about this has actually changed my vocabulary. I’m making a point of replacing the expression bucket list with bliss list. I think it feels much more manageable. It’s a small tweak, but I think it’s really effective.

All right. I have a proposal that in construction projects where they have a punch list, which sounds really negative, they also use bliss list. Punch list being all the little random items that you have to do before the project is done.

Sure. Sure. And just think how great you’ll feel afterward. It’ll be bliss. All the grout and caulking and broken things have to be done.

It’s a bliss list, you tell your contractor. He’ll get it.

Yeah, just reframe it. Think about it differently.

Anyway, I really enjoy this newsletter by Gwen Moran. It’s called Bloom Anywhere.

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