The Life List By Fatima Asim
Islamabad :- When Eleanor Hayes found the list it was not hidden in a secret drawer nor sealed in an envelope marked for it. It lays instead between the pages of a worn copy of Great Expectations; the marks made years ago by a younger and braver hand. The list was simple – ordinary even – but it was trembled with the weight of unfinished life.
- Live honestly
- Love without fear
- Forgive
- Choose myself
- Become who I once dreamed of being.
Eleanor was thirty-three when her mother died, an age that felt neither young enough for excuses nor old enough for certainty. Like Ilicken’s Pip, she had grown up believing that happiness was something granted by fortune rather than forged by courage. Her life, respectable and dull, had followed the expectation of other with obedient precision. She worked in publishing but never worked. She loved safely, never deeply. She breathed, but she did not live.
Her mother Margaret Hayes, had once been different – restless, hopeful, impulsive. Eleanor remembered her telling stories of abandoned dreams with a smile too polite to be sincere. “Life”, Margaret used to say “is not what happens to us, but what we choose to do with what happens”.
Eleanor had nodded at the time, too young to understand that quite warning in those words.
The list was dated fifteen years earlier.
It was her own handwriting.
The discovery unsettled her. Like Wolf’s character standing on the edge of realization. Eleanor felt a sudden fracture between her inner and outer words. Who had she been when she wrote this? And more disturbingly – what had happened to that girl?
In English literature, inheritance often arrives disguised as burden. For Eleanor her, inheritance was not money or property but memory – and expectation. Her mother’ death forced her into reflection, much like Hamlet contemplating his father’s ghost, torn between duty and self-knowledge.
Margret had left Eleanor one condition in her will: complete the list before the year ends.
At first, Eleanor resisted. Lists were childish thing, belonging to adolescence not adulthood. Yet something stirred within her – an echo of the forgotten self. The list was not merely a reminder of abounded dreams; it was an accusation.
To live honestly meant confronting the lie she called stability. To love without fear meant risking rejection. To forgive meant releasing years of quite resentment-towards her mother, towards herself. The list demanded transformation.
And so, reluctantly, Eleanor began.
Her first attempt was love.
She had been with Daniel for four years, a relationship defied by convenience rather than passion. He was kind, reliable, and utterly uncurious about the parts of her that longed for more. Their love resembled the marriages of Austen’s lesser characters – prudent, socially acceptable, and emotionally restrained.
When Eleanor firmly, spoke the truth, her voice trembled but did not break.
“I don’t feel alive,” she said.
Daniel listened, nodded, and replied, “That’s just adulthood”.
In that movement, Eleanor understood what Elizabeth Bennet had known centuries earlier – that comport without connection is not love but compromise. She left Daniel not in anger, but in sorrow, learning that courage often feels like grief before it feels like freedom.
Forgiveness proved harder.
Eleanor had blamed her mother for the life she never lived – for teaching caution instead of courage. But as she reread old letters and journals, a different truth emerged. Margaret had not failed because she lacked dreams; she had failed because she had been afraid.
And fear, Eleanor realized, was not cruelty but inheritance.
In forgiving her mother, Eleanor confronted her own fear, like Ilicken’s Serooge, she saw that past not as punishment, but as instruction. Forgiveness did not erase pain, but it softened its grip.
The final task – become who I once dreamed of being – was the most terrifying.
Eleanor began to write.
At first, the words came awkwardly, like a language half forgotten. But slowly, sentences found rhythm, and ideas found courage. Writing became her rebellion, her resurrection. She was no longer living on the margins of her own story.
Virginia Wolf once wrote that women must have, “a room of her own”. Eleanor found hers not in space, but in purpose.
By the end of the years, she had completed the list.
Or so she thought.
On New Year’s Eve, Eleanor returned to the book where it had all begun. As she closed Great Expectations, a blank page fell open at the end.
Without thinking, she picked up a pen and wrote.
She Smiled.
Life, she understood now, was not a list to be completed but a conversation – between who we were, who we are, and who we dare to become. Like all great English novels, her story did not end in perfection, but in possibility.
And that, she knew was enough.
Sohail Majeed is a Special Correspondent at The Diplomatic Insight. He has twelve plus years of experience in journalism & reporting. He covers International Affairs, Diplomacy, UN, Sports, Climate Change, Economy, Technology, and Health.
