I did not complete NaNoWriMo. I got busy. I wrote 11,000 words approximately. That's still good, even if I didn't finish.
48/52 for 2012...because I am compelled to finish that.
People have been asking since the dawn of thought what our purpose is here. This is probably the most depressing pursuit a person can have, because it makes most day-to-day activities meaningless. I was thinking about those meaningless things today, what I call "The Web" and at first I was feeling lost without purpose. However, stuff exists for a reason, even if we don't know what that reason is, and so there must be purpose in the individual things.
Take my trip to CVS today. I went to CVS to get a razor so that I could shave my legs. I was shaving my legs because I haven't done it in awhile. I haven't done it in awhile because no body was going to see them or touch them. This week my friends and I are getting photos done. Someone will see those photos, and so I needed to shave my legs. The reason we were doing the photo shoot was to have nice pictures for our respective SOs. They like to see us looking nice. We want them to see the photos because we like the way they react.
Okay so that is an example of The Web. A whole bunch of seemingly meaningless things lead to a center thing. However, I was getting very caught up in the trip to CVS. My mind breezed over the other stuff. It was just one more thing I had to do in an endless stream of stuff. As a kid life was simple, and thus meaningful. You did one thing, you got one result. As life became more complicated, there were more steps in between. The trick is to find the meaning in the steps, and not to always be thinking of the end.
So this is what happened. I found what I needed. I went to check out. The guy at the checkout was really nice to me. Keep in mind it's 9:30 on a Saturday night and he is working and I am a pretty girl buying a razor. However, I've worked retail, and it is hard to be nice to even the prettiest, easiest of customers when you are working late on a Saturday night. He made me feel better, and I appreciated how hard it was for him to do that.
And so I started to think about it differently. What if the purposes are all the same? If being nice is the motivating factor for being nice (in a perfect world, keep in mind), then the steps aren't meaningless. That guy was nice to me. I felt better, happier. I was giving money to him, not causing him any trouble, and getting something I needed (two things, if you count the razor) in return.
So then expand to the example Web I gave earlier. Simply, it is that I needed to go to CVS to make my boyfriend happy. Better, it is that I needed to go to CVS so that I could feel the chill in the air that I love and so that my car would warm up after sitting all day. I needed the razor because I appreciate being able to buy things with my money, money that I worked hard for. It helps that I found the exact thing that I was looking for. I'm shaving my legs because I like the way it feels and looks. I'm doing the photo shoot because I like the way that I look and I want to spend time with my friends having fun. I'm giving the photos to my boyfriend because he likes them and I like to see his face when he looks at them. Everything that I do is being nice to me or to someone else - in the hopes that someone will be nice to me in return.
So what if it is all about being nice. The reason people are nice is so that they will continue to be nice. You do one thing in The Web, not to facilitate the next thing, but to continue the thread of niceness. I don't know if this will make sense to anyone else. If it does, I hope that it comforts you, makes you feel better, makes you want to be nice and consider all the nice things happening to you.
