What You Can Do at 52 With a Bucket and No List
By: Robert Turner
Tags: Humor, Bucketlist, Self, Wellbeing, Life Lessons

What You Can Do at 52 With a Bucket and No List

Don’t kick the bucket, you just might need it and not for what you think

Ever wondered where the expression ’kick the bucket’ comes from. It started in the first submarines. Steel buckets could, in theory, be used to pull over your head to trap oxygen whilst you escaped a watery grave and the doomed submarine. If you kicked the bucket you would damage the seal and the air would leak out. The result, one very drowned submariner. Hence the expression.

From submarines to Sub-saharan Africa and sweltering Asia, buckets are everywhere. We use them every day for a range of things. In a lot of ways, the humble bucket is one of our most indispensable creations. At 52 I’ve discovered a whole new level of respect for the bucket. This is the story of that journey of discovery.

I feel way to young for a bucket list. I have always viewed the fifty milestone as the halfway mark and as I passed it I made an important realization. The mind was as young and willing as ever. In fact, according to my female companions, it never passed eighteen. Apparently not a compliment, but I digress. As for the body…, well, let’s just say it needed a little work. Especially if I was planning on maximizing the mileage. No trade-in’s on this model, unfortunately. At this point, the eighteen-year-old brain is going ‘Seriously’. Why would you want to trade-in? Have you looked in a mirror recently?

No gyms, no weights and definitely no Peloton

My problem, or to be more specific, the challenge I faced in achieving the body beautiful, was a geographic one. A location-based headache called the middle of nowhere. No gyms, no weights and definitely no Peloton. What to do?

The Asian jungle contains many things. None, it turns out, is useful for exercise. Lugging about a large bunch of bananas is impractical. Coconuts are great for a game of lawn bowls but useless in terms of weight. Then, gleaming in the late midday sun, it caught my eye. The bucket.

No ordinary bucket, this ex-paint drum happily carried 20 liters of paint. Do the math. That’s twenty kilograms of weight. Plenty for an old fart to get going with, and so started my bucket routine. Every day I would bring my oven glove (great bucket, but the handle is a bitch) and bucket to the outside faucet at the appointed time of 3 pm. The sun has lost a little of its heat by then and dying of dehydration is less of a threat, but still an issue.

It didn’t take long to build a viewing audience. Word of the foreigner in shorts and flip-flops brandished an oven glove and hyperventilating with a bucket soon spread. Mad dogs and Englishmen. I know, I know.

I’d wasted a lot of my misspent youth in the gym and amazingly, my muscles seemed to remember. The bucket incrementally received more and more water and within four months I was looking around for something heavier. I was also getting back into shape at a pace that amazed me and delighted my inner eighteen-year-old.

Our bodies truly are amazing machines. Place them under stress and they respond. I now firmly believe that it doesn’t matter how old we are, our bodies are still capable of growing muscle and our bones will strengthen if we put them under pressure. The keyword here is gradual. Before I inspire you to rush out to try and squat your walker on the front lawn read that again. Gradual. Start light and stick at it. It doesn’t matter what you do, just simply that you do something.

This release of my inner ‘Arnold’ has had other unintended benefits. I now sleep deeply at night and wake refreshed and ready for the day. Nagging joint pains have all but disappeared along with the beer belly and amazingly my younger (by fifteen years) wife’s looks are now divided pretty evenly between lust and pity.

Pop (how can you not name your bucket?) now stands in his rightful place in my kitchen, dried and safe from the weathering effects of sun and rain. I have a newfound respect for this simple yet incredibly useful object. It’s made me wonder what else is standing around that I may have been taking for granted. The humble bucket has proved once again how amazingly versatile it can be. It’s not just for lists.

I have to go now. The eighteen-year-old has been whispering in my ear about YouTube channels and monetizing our new found physique. You’ve all seen the videos right? Tanned, toned sweating torso in the late midday sun, tight shorts, no shirt and the crowd cheering in the background? I may just have to pull a bucket over his head to shut him up.