“Five minutes into the [Hollywood Bowl] show, and I forgot that he had a new performer – Kermit was just Kermit.”
–Joe Hennes, “REPORT: The Muppets Take the Bowl,” ToughPigs.com, September 12, 2017
I’m genuinely happy for Joe that he enjoyed the show, and the same goes for anyone who attended and enjoyed it.
But this is exactly why I don’t want to watch clips from the Hollywood Bowl show; not because I think it won’t be good, but because I’m afraid it will be good.
The last two months have been terrible in so many ways, and yet they’ve brought to my life a sense of purpose that I haven’t felt in a long time.
I don’t want that to go away. I don’t want to forget.
Frog of La Mancha 
Something scrawled in my personal journal from a few days ago: “Happily distracted, still checking in occasionally; and realising that Yes, I could get used to this – the peace of not caring any more. It’s a dilemma. If you stop caring, you stop caring that you’ve stopped caring; but if you care and you imagine yourself not caring, you wish for it not to ever happen.”
Not caring is the fastest road to peace. Caring, at the moment, seems to involve struggle and conflict. My wish for you is the same as my wish for Steve and also for myself: that we’ll all find our own ways ‘round the longer road eventually, to freedom from the unease of the struggle, without relinquishing any of the passion. I firmly believe this can be done; it’ll just take more time. I guess it’s like learning to remember a lost loved one with gladness for the memories, after the sting of grief has worn away – perhaps after months, perhaps many years. Anyway, I take hope in the fact that forgetting is not the only way forward.
I didn’t mean to sound didactic, sorry… my only intent is to offer comfort, if it’s wanted. I’m talking to myself as much as anything. Oh, and I hope your migraine didn’t hang around.
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I appreciate your concern, and I’m always interested in what you have to say. 🙂 Although, I should probably explain that tearful!Dory wasn’t necessarily intended to be a representation of my emotional state at the time I wrote that; I was using her more as a rhetorical tool.
But I do understand what you’re saying, and I agree with you. Forgetting is not the only way forward, and I believe that we will make our way along the longer road eventually, but each at our own pace. Nevertheless, even though we each go at our own pace, we are still traveling together and can still help each other along the way.
That’s the main reason why I’ve made it a point to try to make at least one comment on each of Steve’s blog posts. Regardless of the actual content of the comment, the subtext is always something along the lines of, “Hey man, even if it seems like the whole world has turned away from you and is leaving you behind, you’re not alone in all this.”
As for my migraine, it gave me a few twinges today, but it seems to be pretty well over now–knock on wood.
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Aw shucks, Mary A. 🙂 Like I said at the end of our last (long) conversation, I do appreciate being able to use this space to say things at all.
I admire the fact that you have a coherent game plan. I need to get my subtexts together. I’m trying to… well, we already discussed purposes and roles. In general I’m trying to be constructive, but really I’m just figuring out what I want to say as I go along, in response to each new thing.
One thing I have certainly noticed is that the emotional rollercoaster can take on an all-absorbing, almost addictive quality. I’ve wondered sometimes how much of my death-grip on “caring” is actually related to this, and so your sentence about “sense of purpose” struck a warning note with me. I’ve come to suspect that a fixation on the journey itself without keeping the end goal (closure) in focus will, in the long run, turn out to be unhealthy. I don’t want the tumult to become the new normal in my life. (Are you listening to me, subconscious emotions? I don’t, OK?) I want to get back to simply loving the Muppets without spending large slabs of time overthinking them. It won’t happen overnight, but I do want to make sure I keep progressing towards that end, letting go of the destructive while hanging on to the good.
Steve’s blog will continue to chart his own road, which will no doubt be the longest of all. I find my deepest fear (which I already confessed once over there, after staying up very late one night) is that if he should dig in and resist the journey altogether, we might someday face a terrible choice: to stick with his pace or to part ways and go on alone. That’s definitely a letting go that I wish never to happen, and an outcome I would try hard to prevent. But now I’m just catastrophising. Only time will tell.
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I understand what you mean about the emotional “rollercoaster” becoming all-absorbing and addictive, although I don’t necessarily feel that the one necessarily or automatically follows the other.
As it relates to Steve, I too have contemplated the worst-case scenario of potentially parting ways with him if I feel that he is turning down a destructive path and won’t be dissuaded from it. With that said, however, what I’ve seen from him by and large leaves me feeling more encouraged than concerned. Granted, he didn’t say much in his most recent blog post, but from what he did say, he seems to be in pretty good spirits, and it sounds like he is doing something productive with his time, not just sitting around brooding or “counting flowers on the wall,” as it were.
Interestingly, it was a response that Steve made to you that has given me the most reassurance that he’s willing to keep journeying toward acceptance and closure. The fact that he was not only receptive to what you had to say but responded with such wisdom and grace really told me that he’s not a Captain Ahab or an Inspector Javert, that he’s open to healing and growth. And that openness is what I think is really important. Neither healing nor growth is something that one can accomplish by force of will; one just has to be open to it and allow it to happen when it happens.
As for me, right now I do find the matter all-absorbing, and I think acknowledging and accepting that, and being honest with myself (and now you) about it, is an important step in the process of working toward the long-term goal of closure. Just as one cannot will oneself to heal or to grow, one also cannot will oneself to stop feeling. I know from experience that when one tries to ignore or deny one’s emotions, they don’t go away; they just burrow down deep into one’s subconscious and cause even more and bigger difficulties.
With regard to my “sense of purpose,” right now I view the whole thing–my feelings in regard to Steve and his situation, which led me to start this blog–as being like Wembley’s egg in the Fraggle Rock episode of the same name. Right now, it’s become so important to me that it’s difficult and painful–even a little scary–to think about letting it go. But as time goes on, as the situation changes–and, God willing, starts to improve–I will see the necessity of letting go, and I will do so. Just as Wembley eventually had to let the baby bird go home to its parents, I know that eventually I will come to the point where this will not be the most important thing in my life–although I think it will always hold some importance–but I also know that I’m not at that point yet, so I can’t even really think about it just now. And I’m okay with that, because I realize that it’s all a necessary part of the process.
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Sorry to pick this up again after such a long delay. Life intervening, you know… I made several starts on a response but never found time to finish one. Partly it’s because my feelings are evolving fast, even this past week as the lull continues (“talk amongst yourselves” were obviously the magic words!).
If nothing else, I did want to check in and say that I thought what you wrote just above was wonderfully lucid, and nailed the situation completely.
There is one key difference between us, in that I, for several reasons, haven’t been able to find contentment in letting things take their course. I’m not proud of the way that wrapping my head around these debates sucked so much of my time and energy out of more important things, even if “one also cannot will oneself to stop feeling” is a truism (I’ve never been any good at it, anyway). That’s the tension I’m looking forward to escaping. Muppets are wonderful and special and life-enriching, but there is also life and death, God, family, work, survival… Experience has shown me that getting these all out of order is a recipe for trouble and unhappiness.
That’s why I’m pleased to report that this quiet period seems to have triggered some forward progress of my own. I finally feel like I’m starting to recover a bit of balance. Not that I’m ceasing to feel as strongly about this issue or the Muppets in general, but that these things are again taking their rightful place among the various elements of my life. This is what I’ve been restless for, and it’s a sweet feeling, I promise you. I’d wish it on anyone.
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I’m glad for you that you’re feeling better. 🙂
“Muppets are wonderful and special and life-enriching, but there is also life and death, God, family, work, survival… Experience has shown me that getting these all out of order is a recipe for trouble and unhappiness.”
Yes, you’re right about that, and I’m kind of running into trouble with that in my own life, to the point where I’m going to have to take a step back from the blog here, cut down on my posting, and deal with other life concerns that I’ve been putting on the back burner, and try to bring things back into balance.
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Fair enough. At least with Steve’s blogging also on hold for the moment, it’s an opportune time to scale back or take a break. I wish you all the best with it.
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