See, there are lots of different types of frogs in the world. There are happy frogs and there are sad frogs, and there are frogs who are neither happy nor sad, but who just kind of plod along the middle ground. And that’s the sort of frog that Bill is. It seems kind of wrong to just refer to him as Bill, so we’ll give him a second name. Umm, Summer. His surname is Summer.
Now, mostly Bill Summer is a happy-ish frog. He doesn’t stray far from his lily pad, he has all the friends he could want dotted around various ponds in the area and there’s nothing much disturbs his life. He doesn’t exactly have things how he’d like them to be but he knows they could be a lot worse. The only real problem that Bill has is that when he was a younger frog he was in a big accident. He was left badly injured, and that’s what stops him living the life he wants to lead.
For the most part, Bill has completely come to terms with this, and he’s happy and comfortable with the fact that things aren’t going to be as he imagined them when he was a tadpole. But sometimes he has to go to another pond, and see other frogs. And it’s when he sees the other frogs doing the sort of stuff that he wanted to do that he has a problem, because sometimes he doesn’t understand how he can be happy when he can’t do the things that these frogs are doing. After all, he should be able to live like these frogs; it’s what he’s always wanted. So why can’t he do that, just because of one stupid accident that wasn’t even his fault?
Technically, Bill could still do the stuff that he needed to do to become one of these frogs, but because of the accident he’d be very, very behind. There are three stages you need to do to become one of these frogs and he didn’t even get to do stage one, let alone the others. And so he’s pretty resigned that while he will, one day, do the first two steps, he’ll never get to do the third step. After all, frogs don’t live that long, so he’ll run out of time. Before the accident, Bill was a smart frog. And now? No one really knows, now.
It’s the stupid stuff that makes Bill unhappy. The stuff that people might expect to depress him doesn’t really. He’s not so much depressed by what he can’t do as by what he can do. The list is small, and sometimes he doesn’t really see the point, if there is a point to anything. And he wishes if knew if there is a point, because if there isn’t a point why is he even bothering?
But really, frogs are boring. Which is why the Bill story is finishing now. But there is a moral to this story: be kind to frogs. They’re slimy, but they have feelings too.
I don’t know why that’s the moral – it’s not relevant. It just is.