(Hopefully) Coherent Comments and Rambling Reflections on Endings

So, before going to bed I wrote a bit of a ramble, expressing some things I was feeling at the time. Might be terrible, as I've not edited it, but you know, I thought it might be good to post.

As for today, I'm still more effected that I expected, but I think the expectations were flawed. This is indeed rather like mourning. But still I do look forward to the good things in the future, and fondly back on those in the past. So although my emotions are a bit confused at the moment, with significant components of sadness to the extent of the odd bout of eye-leaking... it's good, in its own peculiar way.

I don't know what the future holds, and probably a lot of it is going to be unpleasant for me and others. But one way or another, I think we'll be alright.

(I think I remembered that closing line, by the way, or the substance of it. Something about how I think in a way fanfiction itself has helped me learn to accept the passage of things, for how stories end, and not always at endings.)

And now the messy ramble below the break (...assuming I've figured out how to do page breaks correctly):

(Probably a bit rambly, this, and no offense taken if you, person coming across it, don't read it all the way, or skim. Not sure how much I'm writing it for others, anyway.)

So. Whew. Saturday was a big day (I'm writing this still in my Saturday waking period, but the Sunday sun is already lighting the sky; night owl that I am, being awake at this time is far from unusual for me, though I do plan to go to bed right after finishing it, and post it, if I do, on Sunday proper), in terms of endings, for me.

Like a lot of other people, I of course got the end of the G4 television series. I missed seeing that live, though, because the time it aired was also the start time of my RPG group's weekly session... and as it happened, not something we set up deliberately, that was the last session of this campaign, which is expected to be the last main campaign in a series of three and probably the last we see of that world beyond maybe the odd one or two session game when someone's absent or we need filler. And that world is a pony setting. Our first campaign in it has its first logged session in November of 2012, and its last in May of 2014; the second started in July 2014 and ran until April 2018, with the the starting May 2018 and running until yesterday/today (we finished after midnight). All together around 318 sessions, depending on how they're counted, and at about four hours each, lined up one after the next they'd have lasted 53 straight days. And a lot's changed over the years since November 2012. So that's a substantial chunk of my life, in terms of impact, and around a quarter in terms of basic length. The RPG group isn't folding, or at least we've no plans to at the moment, and plenty of enthusiasm left, and just as we didn't start off playing ponies, we plan to continue playing other things, with maybe ponies thrown in now and again, and maybe in the far future, if things go that way, another pony campaign. But I don't know if we'll get to that point, and even if we do, right now, at least, we're thinking it won't be in this world we've spent all this time in. Because we've had a lot of good times there, but also some bad ones, and there are some aspects of it that frustrate some people, and by this time there's a lot of weight of precedent and canon to try and keep track of, much of it scattered amongst our hundreds of chat logs. In that way, then, it's the end of another sort of pony generation, for our small group.

I still find it funny we ended up holding our final session of that campaign on the same day at the same time as the G4 finale. :)

So then after the game we chatted for a while as we usually do, and gradually people left to go to bed. Ended up with just three of us left for a bit, and it also happened that were were the three GMs who've run the three main campaigns in that setting. One for this most recent one, one for the second and part of the first, and co-GMing the rest of the first, and me, who started as the primary co-GM of the first, those many years ago. A bit more chatting, and then we said goodnight; I took care of a few little chores, went out and looked at the moon (also a full moon that night, I believe) and what stars could be seen a bit, and then headed back in to watch the finale.

Usually I'd have been on FIMFiction then, checking up on what happened while I was busy with the game, and sometimes, like that day, reading updates or new stories that had posted before the game but that I hadn't had time for. Not that day, though; the one story I'd had already in a window in case I had time got its link saved, and I decided I'd not look at FIMFiction again until tomorrow, to better focus on other things. Pull up the EQD post for the first two parts I'd opened earlier, reload it to get the links, and watch. Finish those, catch up on EQD, reading the posts before the final episode post that had popped up in the meantime, save the ones after it, and watch the link in it. Then finish up those other posts, then take care of some other things, then try to read a bit and decide that with the hour and how I was feeling, I should probably just go to bed.

And then I decided to write this, keeping up my general trend of being bad at getting to bed on time.

It's interesting, comparing my feelings after the end of the game and after the end of the show.

The former focused more on... contemplating the strange joy findable in nostalgic melancholy, perhaps it could be described. Or melancholic nostalgia; I'm not sure which would be better. But the feeling of things past. "This shall not come again". But then, that's true of everything; a particular patter of dust on the kitchen floor will not come again, but I feel little impulse to mourn it, or indeed think about it at all. I think, at least so I thought, and though I am not feeling now quite as I did then, I think I do not disagree with the substance of my thoughts then, that to try and really look at the depths of the past is either to learn to accept it or to be driven mad (and I do like to think I'm following the former). Billions of people just in our known history of Earth have been born, grown up, built, loved, suffered, faced events of great significant to them and events of great tedium, grown old, and died; cities have risen from nothing, thrived for centuries, and fallen to stones in sand. Much more yet has surely happened to humanity outside the records we know, and the history of life on our planet stretches far farther back then that. If for one hundred thousand years there had thrived a civilization of some dinosaur species, with agriculture and art and great cities of wood and mud brick, quite possibly we would find just as much evidence of it as we would if there had been no such people. Widen the scope beyond sapience (And we as a species do often like nature documentaries and studies, and interactions with our pets, do we not? Clearly the lack of a humanlike mind does not remove our interest) or sapience as we would understand it, and how many trillions upon trillions of little dramas have played out without our notice? Widen the scope beyond our small dot, in time and in space, back and back and out and out, and what we cannot know expands to a magnitude yet more beyond our ability to easily process.

And so, either accept inevitable loss, loss that has happened, will happen, and is happening, or go mad. Or don't really think about it, which I think pretty much we all use in part, most of the time.

I was getting off track, a bit, I think. Right. Joy in nostalgic melancholy.

There was a curious similarity, I was thinking, in feeling among (dates approximate) a statue carved five thousand years ago, a ruin built two thousand years ago, a still-used building from perhaps two or three centuries or less ago, and a place I played as a child only around twenty years ago. All these feelings coming from memory, at the time of this thinking, so there may be some inexact aspects. Feelings of "Once there was life here". Not that there was necessarily no life there, when I had those feelings. The statue and ruin were in a museum, and well-attended; the younger building was when I visited a store that seemed to be doing good business. But the museum visitors are not the artists who made the statue and those who first appreciated it, so long ago, nor those who used the ruin for its intended purpose; those who visit the shop are not those who built and lived in what I believe was first a house. Things have changed, and the old is gone.

I remembered also a story, a short one. I forget where and when I first heard it, and the exact phrasing, but this is the sort of story, I think, where it is the meaning that matters in a retelling. There was a wealthy king who sought great treasures, and one day he spoke to a master artificer. "Make me," said the king, "something that will make me happy when I am sad and sad when I am happy." The artificer worked, and soon presented the king with a ring. A plain band, adorned with no stones, and bearing on it merely a single phrase: "This too shall pass".

And so, things have passed, that made me happy, and so I am sad. But in passing, they join all those good things that have passed before, and are passing every moment. They live in us as we remember them, yet even if and when memory of them itself passes, still it will not be changed that they happened. To be in the past is to be, in a way, invulnerable, for whatever may happen in the future, for whatever may be remembered, misremembered, or forgotten, it has already happened. Yet still, to be in the past is not the same as to be in the present or the future, and so, though I take joy in what happened, I feel sorrow that the state of these ongoing things being just that, in the present and present tense, is now out of my reach forever; they have gone behind me, and though I may look back and see them shining there, and known that they shine there still even if seen by none, I cannot return and walk among them again.

And there is nothing wrong with being sad about the passing, for although the universe is very big and I am very small, and these things are very small as well, these things are large in my own life, small things together. On my scale, they matter, and this is good, for I cannot rearrange the stars in the sky and so would face futility if I concerned myself primarily with that, and have such power to move individual grains of dirt in my back yard that I would face terrible choice and vast expenditure of myself if I tried to individually reposition each one for the convenient of the insects. It is good to reach down and up a bit, and probe further, to see if perhaps in one circumstances or another boundaries could and should be pushed, but our abilities and concerns evolved together.

I believe I am getting offtopic again, as much as this had a topic. And looking at the clock, I really should be getting to bed soon.

I suppose... hm.

All things pass. This cannot be helped, only delayed or hastened as appropriate, and accepted. We have had great things here, and good times and bad, and now much of that has passed. Yet always, more comes. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Eventually, it comes only after we ourselves have passed. As we have lost almost all the music of ancient Rome, so too one day shall pony be forgotten. It is okay to be sad about that; it is okay to be sad about the more local loss we, and I, felt yesterday. But a tree and a pillar cannot share the same space, and so sometimes a pillar must fall for a tree to rise. Much as many of us, myself included, may have wanted the good times, these specific good times, to continue forever, they could not, in the present and future, and so let us also think of the joy others may take in their own lives, in strange future times.

But closer to home, well. The show may be over, and that years-long RPG setting may now never see such use again, but I have no plans to leave just yet; if the way of the world dictates I must leave eventually, why rush? After all, whatever others may take joy in in strange future times, I take joy in this, now. And so there will be more fanfiction to read, and games to play, and I plan to give G5 a chance and hope for the best. I don't know when I might be able to make it to another convention, but I certainly want to. And if I feel out of sorts right now, well, that too shall pass, and particularly once I've had more time to process and grow around this and also get some sleep because I really am rather tired now. :)

Don't regret staying up to write this, though, rambly as it may indeed be (Congratulations if you've gotten this far! Trying to wrap it up!).

(And this parenthetical section was written after the next paragraph because shortly after starting getting ready for bed I remembered that I tangented so far I forgot an entire line of thought I wanted to pursue. Very organized, this. :D
Anyway, so that comparison I think I mentioned: after the show finale, I was dealing with different sorts of feelings I think because then there was a movement back to normality to make. Participating in endings of such years-long things that have had such significance in my life is not normal, and so, when moving back from that state of mind to "Check email, that one's spam, oh that one's amusing, process that one, okay now I need to check to see if that's updated, oh and update that checklist...", in short more or less normality, involves its own sorts of frictions; I believe I've observed similar sorts before in similar extraordinary-to-ordinary situations, but I'm both I think too tired to really go into that properly now and really should be getting to bed. So goodnight, er, sort of again. :))

...I think I had a really good closing line, but now I can't seem to remember it. Oh well.
...Nope, still not coming back to me. Well, I wasn't intending to post this until some time after I work up anyway, so maybe I'll remember it, or think of something else.
But for now... goodnight, however (in)appropriate that may be at whatever time I actually post this, and I'm off to bed. :D

Comments

[WavemasterRyx]

You did put quite a lot of deep thought into this all, sir, and honestly i don't think i'm qualified to really discuss it, heh... i just thought you should know that at least one person took the time to read everything you put down, so that your effort is recognized.

i will say though, i don't blame you for being emotional about both events; the end of Friendship is Magic or your campaign setting. As you said, they have been a significant portion of your life, and that does matter.

i definitely hope your RPG group continues to have fun new adventures, and i hope you were able to get a good night's sleep after you got this all expressed.

[Reese]

5141445
Oh, well, thank you, and thank you. :)

Aye, indeed, major parts of my life in multiple ways.

Thanks! We have plans for such, at least.
And I believe I recall I did; thanks for that, as well. :)