What is the 1000 Cranes Project? It is a personal goal I decided to embark on before my 35th birthday. 1000 goals that I hope to complete within 10 years, hopefully by my 45th birthday. You've heard of bucket lists, those lofty lists of things to accomplish before you die, well the 1000 Cranes project borrows a little from that, and a little from simply wanting to live a life free from regret, and a little bit of Chris Baty's (creator of NaNoWriMo) advice, "The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It's the lack of a deadline." See that's part of the problem I see with a lot of bucket lists out there, the deadline is when you are dead, and you never know when that will happen. Most of us still take for granted that we have a long way to go, and for the few of us that are given a more definitive date, such as being diagnosed with a terminal illness, we often find the time is too short for what we had planned, or worse now we are no longer capable of accomplishing the things we had always wanted to do "someday".
In fact it was the recent diagnosis of a friend of mine, along with my personal issues of getting "older" at 35, that prompted me to come up with this crazy idea. I set the 10 year deadline so that I will make a concerted effort everyday to work on my list. Some tasks are quick and easy and can be knocked out with little effort, others will take weeks or months to accomplish or require saving up a lot of money to complete. Hopefully the two will balance out so that I can stay on track and complete them all on time.
Why a 1000 goals? And what do cranes have to do with it? Well that is another source of inspiration. One day while surfing the internet for ideas to add to my list, I came across the legend of the 1000 paper cranes. The legend in Japan is that if you fold 1000 paper origami cranes you will please the Gods and they will grant you a wish. Because of this many people fold paper cranes to give to newlywed couples or other people as gifts of good luck. There is a legend of a little girl, Sadako Sasaki, who developed leukemia due to exposure to radiation during the bombing of Hiroshima. When Sadako was hospitalized due to her illness her best friend, Chizuko Hamamoto came to visit and folded a paper crane for her and told her of the legend. Sadako was entranced with the hope that the Gods might grant her wish and heal her so she collected any scraps of paper she could find and worked on folding 1000 paper cranes, folding over 1300 before her death just a few months later. People now keep the story of Sadako and the paper cranes alive as a message of peace, and there is a statue of her at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, where every day thousands of paper cranes arrive from all over the world from children inspired by the Sadako's story.
If I could have one wish it would be to have lived a life with no regrets. With daily life it's easy to get bogged down and forget the things you want to achieve that are greater than the laundry and errands and work of the moment. Time runs away from us when we aren't looking, and before we know it our children are grown and gone before we were able to take that adventurous camping trip we always talked about, and milestones we wanted to celebrate passed us by while we were stressing over the small stuff. Sometimes we need a list to keep us on task, and the greatest task we can accomplish before we die is to have really lived our lives, and not just let them slip by while we were busy planning for the somedays.
My list has all sorts of things both great and small. Let me tell you, it taxes the brain a bit to come up with 1000 things, and some of it I came up with in desperation. There are some household tasks I really need to do but always put off, but the sooner they are done and off my mind the more at peace I will be, and some things I simply need to learn how to do. There are things I want to make sure I do with my kids before they are gone, as they are 8 and 11 now, and in 10 years they will be 18 and 21 and we will be ready to start a whole new adventure. There are personal goals I want to accomplish, such as furthering my writing talent, and actively pursuing a career in writing. I also want to stretch my creative muscles with some artistic challenges, and I have many personal relationship challenges in there as well.
Some of the items on my list I have accomplished before and want or need to accomplish again. Some may seem silly, and a few really simply are, but every item on the list means something to me somehow, so it's worth having there. I will admit that as it took me three weeks to come up with the list, there might be a few duplicate items on there, but as I discover them I'll replace them with new goals. I also reserve the right to alter or substitute other goals should the goals on my list no longer fit my lifestyle later on in life, but hopefully I'll be able to accomplish all of them with their original intentions.
I hope you will find this project interesting or at the very least entertaining, and I hope you will join me as I attempt to complete 1000 goals, folding a paper crane for each one as I finish till I finally achieve my goal and can rest secure that I left no regrets.
And now for the list.....
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