Speaker A
So, I went coffin shopping in Ghana, and if you go, if you're not into the whole pine box motif, Ghana is the place to go.
Edward Readicker-Henderson challenges the bucket list culture, sharing his journey of living fully despite multiple terminal diagnoses.
Key Takeaways
- Bucket lists can create unnecessary pressure and reduce life to a checklist rather than lived experience.
- Facing death multiple times taught Edward to prioritize joy and presence over societal expectations.
- Dying is painful and emotionally difficult, with no guaranteed enlightenment or peace.
- True peace is hard to find due to external noise and internal mental clutter.
- Living fully means doing things because they are fun and meaningful, not because they are required.
Summary
- Edward Readicker-Henderson recounts unique experiences such as coffin shopping in Ghana and traveling to iconic locations like Timbuktu and Victoria Falls.
- He critiques the modern obsession with bucket lists and the pressure to complete 'must-do' experiences before death.
- Edward reflects on being told multiple times he has less than a year to live and how this shaped his approach to life.
- He emphasizes living for the joy of the moment rather than fulfilling societal expectations or checklists.
- The talk explores the harsh realities of dying, including pain, humiliation, and emotional impact on loved ones.
- Edward shares his search for peace and quiet in remote places like Haleakala, the Arctic, Mongolia, and the Marshall Islands.
- He discusses the pervasive noise of modern life and the difficulty of finding internal calm.
- The speaker rejects the idea of writing a bucket list that ends with death, advocating instead for living authentically.
- He highlights the contrast between external noise and internal mental noise, emphasizing the challenge of meditation and mindfulness.
- Ultimately, Edward encourages embracing life while alive rather than focusing on death as a final goal.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
You want to be buried in a giant beer bottle, that's not a problem.
Speaker A
What, to go through the afterlife proclaiming your undying devotion to the oil industry, it's a little weird, but you could do that. How about be buried in a fish, and a cow, and a pineapple, and a sort of chocolate eclair-looking thing?
Speaker A
They've got it right on the showroom floor.
Speaker A
And here, of course, is the one I picked, the traveler's coffin, and, um, you know, maybe I'm being presumptuous because this is obviously the good traveler's coffin.
Speaker A
Bad travelers going to hell get a middle seat in coach.
Speaker A
I was in Ghana as part of this tour that was billed as the West Africa you must see before you die, check off your bucket list, and we were doing really cool things.
Speaker A
Uh, we went to Timbuktu, which means for the rest of my life, I can casually say, when I was in Timbuktu, we went to Victoria Falls, which is unbelievable.
Speaker A
The force of all this water falling off the edge of the world is so loud that even from a mile away, when I got cornered by an enraged monkey and started to yell for help, not a single one of the zebra looked up.
Speaker A
And we went out into the sand dunes of Namibia at night, where there were more stars than I have ever seen anywhere in my life, but they were Southern Hemisphere stars, so I didn't know them, I didn't recognize any of the patterns in the sky, and I had this weird moment of transposition of thinking, maybe I'm the one on the different planet, and maybe one of those little blinking lights is everything I love.
Speaker A
And in Ghana, our hotel was right on the beach, but in the morning when we loaded out, I discovered that not a single one of the people I was with, not a single one of these people spending vast sums of time and money to see the world they had to see before they died, had so much in Ghana stuck a toe in the ocean.
Speaker A
Not a one of them had gone down and stood into the Bite of Benin, which was really surprisingly cool, I thought, when I was washing the coffin sawdust off my feet.
Speaker A
But, you know, it just wasn't on their bucket list.
Speaker A
And somehow it has all become about the bucket list, books you must read, movies you must see, music you must hear, these great imperatives of all these things you must check off because art and beauty are things that you can say, did it.
Speaker A
And nowhere has this taken over as much as it has in travel. You don't go to vacation anymore, you don't just go to Spain and drink sangria, you go to Spain and hike the Camino.
Speaker A
And you don't go to Paris and watch the boulevards, you go eat in every three-star Michelin restaurant, and if you don't do these things, if you ignore these imperatives of things you must do before you die, obviously your life's meaningless.
Speaker A
So you've, so you've got a carpe diem, you've got to be checking off that bucket list like you're Santa Claus on a cocaine bender.
Speaker A
Because just like the naked teenagers in the horror movie, you are going to die, and the question is not if, but when.
Speaker A
But I started to think, I don't, I'm not good at doing what I'm told to. I don't want to have to do things. What if instead of thinking I had to do something before I die, what if I just did something while I was alive?
Speaker A
What if I just did it because it's fun?
Speaker A
Because this is more or less what a year left to live sounds like.
Speaker A
The doctors would not let me record my own heart, so I found this one online, under the title, Sounds Associated with Sudden Death, which is just this really fun thing to have come up on your iPod shuffle.
Speaker A
And you can just hear in the back of your head.
Speaker A
That that Dick Clark voice of saying, it's got a crappy beat and you absolutely cannot dance to it.
Speaker A
But the first time I was told I had less than a year to live was about 15 years ago.
Speaker A
And since then, I've been told five more times. Once every couple of years, the medical profession gets together and says, hey, you, out of the pool, time's up.
Speaker A
And as you've already guessed, spoiler alert.
Speaker A
Now, if, if we put aside the possibility that somehow I am as indestructible and immortal as Keith Richards.
Speaker A
What, what we're left with is that because of my refusal to die on cue, so far, I have consciously lived the last year of my life six times.
Speaker A
Most people do this once or not at all and they get it over with, but, but I've done it again and again and again.
Speaker A
And sometimes I've done it really well. I've been to more than 50 countries since I was told to stop traveling, I've met kings and shaman, and I've fallen in love, and I've fallen back in love, and I have been pecked by penguins.
Speaker A
And, of course, sometimes I do the whole dying thing very badly. Somebody once posted on Facebook, I'm going to live every day like it's my last, and my little sister just blasted them.
Speaker A
She was, yeah, well, my brother just found out this really might be his last day, and he's decided he's going to spend it taking painkillers and eating cookies.
Speaker A
Yeah, hobnobs and Vicodin, the breakfast of people who are just too tired to care if they're champions.
Speaker A
So, now is really when I wish I could say something uplifting.
Speaker A
And there, there are people who can do that, you know, there are people who come through this storm or their version of this storm, and they find some measure of hope or enlightenment, and death makes them bigger.
Speaker A
I missed that bus.
Speaker A
Uh, best I can tell, dying sucks. It's painful, and it's humiliating, and every day you wake up and there's another little piece of you missing.
Speaker A
And somehow, no matter how empty the tanks are, somehow you have to find a way to compensate for this, to find a way to still be who you are.
Speaker A
And even worse than that, is that dying makes you see pain in the faces of the people you love.
Speaker A
And you can't save them from that pain, because it's the pain of them wanting to save you.
Speaker A
So, you know, maybe, maybe you can get an epiphany or two out of it, um, but it seems to me like a really expensive way to hit these epiphanies.
Speaker A
I, as far as I can see, dying is absolutely nothing to live for.
Speaker A
It's just nothing to live for, which is why this whole bucket list idea freaks me out so much.
Speaker A
Why on Earth is everybody so excited about writing lists?
Speaker A
A to-do list.
Speaker A
That invariably, the last thing on it is die.
Speaker A
No, no.
Speaker A
I, I just couldn't do that.
Speaker A
It was just, I, I had enough lists from doctors already, and I'm not going to write.
Speaker A
I'm not going to write my own list that says die, so I just thought, screw it.
Speaker A
I'm going to go find some peace and quiet, which brings us here to Haleakala.
Speaker A
If you go looking for peace and quiet.
Speaker A
You very quickly find out there isn't any.
Speaker A
Humans are the species that make noise, and we are just ever better and better at it.
Speaker A
Your car stereo is probably more powerful than the amps the Beatles had when they played Shea Stadium.
Speaker A
Noise is so much a part of the fabric of our daily lives that if you get a person from North America into a relaxed state and ask them to hum a note.
Speaker A
The note they are overwhelmingly likely to hum is a B natural, which is the same note as the electricity.
Speaker A
In the wires everywhere around us.
Speaker A
And of course, we make all this noise for the very simple reason, as anybody who has ever tried to meditate will tell you, it's worse in here.
Speaker A
It's much, much worse in here.
Speaker A
It's so loud in here, all those lists of the things that you should do but haven't and shouldn't do but have and who you should be but aren't.
Speaker A
The the endless pounding of desires, and I thought, I've just got to, I've got to get very far away from all this.
Speaker A
So I went up to the Arctic where I camped with the, with the locals.
Speaker A
And listened to the, the hard click of caribou hooves on migration.
Speaker A
And I went to Mongolia where I was kayaking on a lake up near the Russian border, and the ice was just breaking up for the spring.
Speaker A
And there was this amazing delicate wind chime sound in the crackles.
Speaker A
And out in the Marshall Islands, I was on this tiny little atoll, when a storm hit, a storm hit at night, and as I was listening to it, I realized I can hear a difference in the waves in the lagoon and the waves in the ocean.
Speaker A
They're making different sounds.
Speaker A
And so I ran outside, pouring rain, palm trees thrashing around, coconuts dropping like cannonballs, and I'm standing there, and I'm moving back and forth, and I'm listening to this duet of lagoon and ocean, and the world is singing just for me.
Speaker A
And then I got sick.
Speaker A
Which is nothing unusual, I am always at some degree sick.
Speaker A
But this was somebody's cut the elevator cables free fall sick.
Speaker A
I was briefly poured into a wheelchair, I spent about six months passing out every time I did something dramatic like stand up, and I found out that if I'm understanding this correctly, it's possible to dehydrate your eyeballs.
Speaker A
Which makes the entire world look as if you're walking through a room of slightly deflated party balloons.
Speaker A
And so in this state, of course, I'm going to look at a ticket to go to Hawaii.
Speaker A
Climb down a volcano.
Speaker A
I figured there was about an 80% chance I'd die, to be honest, when I told my doctor, he just went, I'm out.
Speaker A
I'm done.
Speaker A
I'm out.
Speaker A
When I left home, my will was neatly centered on my desk.
Speaker A
Where it'd be easy to find.
Speaker A
But, you know, I was, I was okay with the risk.
Speaker A
Because first, I knew eventually my friends will love telling this story.
Speaker A
What happened to Edward?
Speaker A
He threw himself into a volcano and died.
Speaker A
And second, because as a poet Frank O'Hara said, we fight for what we love, not what we are.
Speaker A
You don't need to fight for death, that's nothing to love for, it's much, much better to fight to be alive.
Speaker A
The bottom of Haleakala, might be the quietest place on Earth.
Speaker A
People who research these things are not entirely sure because when they went to measure it, the microphones, it was so quiet, the microphones picked up the sound of their own metal fatigue, which made getting an accurate reading impossible.
Speaker A
So, I started hiking right after sunrise.
Speaker A
Took me about seven hours to get down.
Speaker A
I don't know how many times I fell.
Speaker A
I don't know how many times I just sat down and said, okay.
Speaker A
Gonna die here.
Speaker A
There was.
Speaker A
I don't know, maybe an hour where I was either sleepwalking or hallucinating.
Speaker A
I don't know what it was.
Speaker A
But, but I did get there, I got to the point that the Park Service does not want to identify too closely as the quietest place on Earth.
Speaker A
And I collapsed.
Speaker A
And so I had no choice but to listen.
Speaker A
And I listened until my head stopped screaming, you're going to die in a volcano.
Speaker A
And I listened until my head stopped saying, you're going to die in a volcano.
Speaker A
That's kind of cool.
Speaker A
And I had been told that if it's a really quiet day down there, you'll not exactly hear but be aware of a pulse.
Speaker A
Which is actually the waves hitting the island miles and miles off.
Speaker A
And I did hear something.
Speaker A
It actually sounded kind of like that.
Speaker A
It sounded like the world saying, your heart's still beating, you're not dead yet.
Speaker A
It sounded like the world saying, let's go outside and play.
Speaker A
So, when I got out of the volcano, I felt better than I had in years, and I completely changed the way I traveled.
Speaker A
Instead of saying, I want to see, I said, I wonder.
Speaker A
And I would go places with no idea what I was going to find.
Speaker A
I'd just show up to see what was going to happen.
Speaker A
I wonder what memory smells like.
Speaker A
And I ended up in the perfume fields of France.
Speaker A
I wonder why two people standing right next to each other can see such entirely different things.
Speaker A
And I went to a bunch of haunted houses in England to, to try and find a ghost.
Speaker A
Because you, you, you put, your bucket list puts these expectations.
Speaker A
You, you already know before you get there what it's going to be like.
Speaker A
But how often is it really like that?
Speaker A
A friend and I did the great romantic trip to Venice.
Speaker A
And we drank Bellinis by the Grand Canal, and we went for gondola rides, and we slept in palaces, and we kissed at the top of bridges to protect each other from trolls.
Speaker A
And it was okay.
Speaker A
We had a nice time.
Speaker A
Uh, but you know, really, I mean, I look at my life, the thing, the two most important things I can think of.
Speaker A
The two things without which I would not be me, happened in a high school library and a hotel hallway.
Speaker A
And how would I have ever known to want these things?
Speaker A
How could I've ever put them on a list and say these are the things that I must do before I die?
Speaker A
You have to be there for the surprise.
Speaker A
So after Venice, we had a couple of days left of vacation, and we just asked the hotel concierge what we should do.
Speaker A
And he went.
Speaker A
Made a phone call, wrote out a quick note of directions and said, here.
Speaker A
You're really going to enjoy this.
Speaker A
Which is how we ended up at the entirely miraculous little town of Asolo.
Speaker A
It's only about an hour outside Venice.
Speaker A
But it's a different world.
Speaker A
It's all cobblestones and window boxes.
Speaker A
And despite all the leaves you see there, there's really more birds in those trees.
Speaker A
And every one of them is singing.
Speaker A
And I went into the food shop and asked the proprietor if the jar of honey was from Asolo.
Speaker A
Which in my fluent Italian meant, Asolo?
Speaker A
And the man's face just lit up.
Speaker A
He said, Asolo!
Speaker A
And, and I looked at him more closely, and he had these throat, these ear-to-ear scars of who knows how many throat surgeries.
Speaker A
But now he was really excited because he could sell us an Asolo picnic.
Speaker A
And he ran around the store and he grabbed bread, Asolo, and figs, Asolo, and olives, Asolo, and this really amazing blue-veined cheese that you could smell clear across the room, Asolo.
Speaker A
And when I pointed at another cheese that I wanted, he said, no, Asolo.
Speaker A
And he wouldn't sell it to us.
Speaker A
And, yeah.
Speaker A
Of course, that was the greatest lunch of my life.
Speaker A
And in that, in that utter surprise, in something we never could have put on a bucket list.
Speaker A
Because 24 hours before, we had never heard of this town.
Speaker A
My friend and I found everything that we had been hoping for from the trip.
Speaker A
And everything that we had hoped been hoping to be for each other on the trip.
Speaker A
Your bucket list is about you.
Speaker A
It's, it's you trying to stop time.
Speaker A
Live every day like it's your last.
Speaker A
Check off the bucket list.
Speaker A
And what you're really doing is trying to make your life into like this little collection of snow globes.
Speaker A
And say, here, this, this, this, these are the things that really matter to me.
Speaker A
But if you just live because you're alive, you'll find out.
Speaker A
That there's no reason to go shopping for coffins one minute early.
Speaker A
You'll find out that instead of trying to drop things in your bucket list, you'll find that the world is just pouring things into it.
Speaker A
Everything is coming into it, and it's just overflowing.
Speaker A
And so that all you really have to do when the time finally does come, is let go of it and say thank you.
Topics:bucket listtraveldeathliving fullyEdward Readicker-HendersonTEDxMauimindfulnessterminal illnesslife philosophypeace and quiet
