Transitions, Paper Towns and the Meaning of Life

Blog posts, eh? Those are always nice, I suppose. I should probably write some more of those.

My life is, as it seems to always be, in a state of transition. There are many projects on the horizon: Internet Prom this Saturday, JulNoWriMo (more on that later) and secret series #MB, to name a few. In addition, everything I am personally involved in right now- volunteering at my old high school to get hours for the College of Ed; going through the application and interview process for jobs; even trying to become a YouTube Partner (here's the obligatory plug) is just another step toward the future.

It's like the excellent John Green novel, Paper Towns. If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it, but it's an excellent book and I highly recommend it for anyone. There's a link to get it at the bottom of the post but whatever you do makes no difference to me and I digress. One of the themes of the book is that everything is just preparation for the future. Even when no ideal end is in sight, no point where we think we've the perfect life, we live to survive so that, in the end, we can say our lives had any meaning in the first place.

It makes me think about what I said in this video. Life doesn't really have a singular purpose. That's why the question of the meaning of life often has vague answers like "other people" or "love" or some appeal to theology. Looking at the grand perspective, the majority of our lives will be about "nothing" in the figurative sense. I'm not trying to preach nihilism here. Just because life doesn't have a specific point does not mean life is pointless, worthless or otherwise not worth living. It's just that, like a lot of things, life is not simple enough to be summed up in easy terms.

To kind of try and bring the whole post into a tidy summary, I'd like to use that overused Lennon quote-"Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." So these transitional periods are much more real than some imagined future. After all, as is said in another John Green book, to imagine the future is a type of nostalgia. It's not life. You're not waiting to "get a life" because you've already got one and this is it.

I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe it's that preparation is essentially no different than execution. Maybe I just wanted to get all existential today. Either way, I hope it made some sense.