Life Inspiration...

Some of the Things I Really Must Do 
Before I Die*
From Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec

First of all there are things very easily done, things I could do as from today, for example
    1 Take a trip on a bateau-mouche
Then things a tiny bit more significant, things that involve decisions, things which I tell myself that, were I to do them, would perhaps make my life easier, for example
    2 Make up my mind to throw out a certain number of things that I keep without knowing why I keep them
or else
    3 Arrange my bookshelves once and for all
    4 Acquire various household appliances
or again
    5 Stop myself smoking (before being forced to)
Then things linked to a more profound desire for change, for example
    6 Dress in a completely different way
    7 Live in a hotel (in Paris)
    8 Live in the country
    9 Go and live for quite a long time in a foreign city (London)
Then things that are linked to dreams of time or space. There are quite a few:
    10Pass through where the Equator crosses the International Date-Line
    11 Go beyond the Arctic Circle
    12 To have an ‘out-of-time’ experience (like Siffre)
    13 Take a trip in a submarine
    14 Take a long trip on a boat
    15 Make an ascent or a journey in a balloon or airship
    16 Go to the Kerguelen Islands (or to Tristan da Cunha)
    17 Ride a camel from Morocco to Timbuktu in 52 days
Then among all the things I don’t yet know, there are certain ones I’d like to have the time to discover properly
    18 I’d like to go into the Ardenned
    19 I’d like to go to Bayreuth, but also to Prague and to Vienna
    20 I’d like to go to the Prado
    21 I’d like to drink some rum found at the bottom of the sea (like Captain Haddock in The Treasure of Red Rackham)
    22 I’d like to have time to read Henry James (among others)
    23 I’d like to travel along canals
Next there are lots of things that I’d like to learn, but I know I won’t because it would take me too long, or because I know I would succeed only very imperfectly, for example
    24 Find the solution to the Rubik cube
    25 Learn to play the drums
    26 Learn Italian
    27 Learn the trade of printer
    28 Paint
Then things connected with my work as a writer. There are a lot of them. For the most part these are vague projects; some are perfectly possible and depend on me, for example
    29 Write for very young children
    30 Write a science-fiction novel
others depend on things I might be asked to do
    31 Write the script for an adventure film in which, for example, you would see 5,000 Kirghiz tribesmen riding across the steppes
    32 Write a real serial novel
    33 Work with a strip cartoonist
    34 Write songs (for Anna Prucnal for example)
There’s one more thing I’d like to do, but I don’t know where it belongs, it’s to
    35 Plant a tree, and watch it get bigger
Finally, there are things it’s impossible to envisage from now on but which would have been possible not so long ago, for example
    36 Get drunk with Malcolm Lowry
    37 Make the aquaintance of Vladimir Nabokov
etc., etc.
There are lots of other for sure.
I gladly stop at 37.

*The written version of a radio broadcast made by Perec on France-Culture in 1981.