Just random thinking tonight

I'm a fan of countdown lists. Top 10, top 20, etc. The website LiveScience.com has some pretty good ones. I stumbled onto this one, 7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You, and realized that these are very much related to SL as well. One of them really struck a chord with me, as far as SL is concerned.

Lack of meaning. If you lack a sense of purpose, your stay on Earth could be truncated.

This is quite true in SL. If you come into SL and have no good purpose, you probably will have a pretty bad SLife. Pick a good reason to be here. It can be as simple as "I'm here to help my friends when they need it." Not everyone is a builder, or an artist, or even a blogger. There are those who are social, who keep conversations going, who make people feel welcome on the grid. That is a wonderful purpose. Make your purpose something that's for the greater good. Sometimes I think there are people in SL whose sole purpose is to hurt people, or upset them, or to keep them down. That is just as horrible as having no purpose at all, in my opinion.

While I was in the hospital with my mom last weekend, I had a lot of time to just sit and think in the evenings, when she was sleeping and I was watching the monitors. Right before all of that happened, I had spent a nice hour at the Isabel infohub one evening last week, chatting with some very new residents and a couple of the helpers out there. A couple of the newbies had asked "What can you do in Second Life?" The answer, of course, was "Pretty much anything you can imagine."

So I started thinking, what am I doing with my SLife lately? I've done many many things before. I do many many things now. But what HAVEN'T I done yet that would be interesting? I've never really scripted anything. I've never actually designed and created clothing, unless you count some prim skirts, which I kinda don't. I've never actually built a house, or made an animation, or created art, or really made my own sculpties. I've never had a family, or gotten married, or had the SL wedding of my dreams.

And some people might be sad about that. But me? Nope. I'm actually kind of glad that I still have a reason to log in every single day. And I'm going to. Every month, I'm going to try to mark something else off the list. Not that the list will probably ever end. :) As the saying goes...

Life is a journey, not a destination.