Oh, bother!
As I write this post on my all time favourite Bear, my heart beats faster than usual and I can feel my ear lobes heating up (that's what happens when I blush).
It was a simple but poignant article in today's newspaper that set me thinking about dedicating a blog to Winnie The Pooh. It was also through this article that I learnt that Winnie the Pooh was created in 1926! Almost 90 years of being cuddly and still going strong.
Like most children in my time, I grew up watching many kinds of cartoons - Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny and Warner Bros, Scooby Doo, Captain Planet, Mickey Mouse. The only one that stayed with me after I graduated to Rom Coms, and then to Documentaries and Oscar Winning films was Winnie The Pooh and his adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood. While Pooh Bear cuddly toys and other licensed products are commonplace nowadays, my first (and unfortunately, the last) t shirt with Winnie the Pooh on it was bought at Colombo Airport in Sri Lanka in early 2003. It was a store for children and I had bought the largest size. I had worn the t shirt long after the rubber print had worn off, leaving faint shadows behind.
Shortly after that a friend gifted me an A3 size poster of Pooh Bear and his friends. The poster occupied pride of place in my tiny hostel room in college, never ceasing to cheer me up, because:
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
Then I was privileged to own, for a very short time, a Pooh cuddly toy. Sadly it got wet in the rain and never really returned to its original splendour after that. I had to give it away as its dank odour was making its position on the centre of my bed untenable.
Like Cinderella, I have tried to rationalize my love for this fluffily stuffed Bear. The oil for this eternal flame, I now realise, is that Pooh has many facets to his nature, not unlike a diamond. I have discovered each part over time.
There is an endearing simplicity in the Pooh stories, where all that mattered was protecting Piglet from fierce thunderstorms, or finding Eeyore's tail. If I could choose a life to lead, even from tomorrow, it would be with Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. I could borrow books from Owl, help Rabbit with his carrots and give Eeyore a hug when he loses his tail. Again. Maybe Tigger will teach me how to bounce like him, and Pooh will teach me that Life is as simple or complicated as we make it out to be. With Hundred Acres of Wood to explore, we would never run out of Adventures.
Cutting to the present, my most recent discovery is his penchant for the bon mot.
When he said,
"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
I thought about all the things in life that I take for granted. It is only when I have lost them that I have realised their worth.
“What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?”
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best-” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
We are on a journey, and most of the time it is easy to mistake the journey for the destination. Where we are, every day, is at that point just before we begin to eat the honey, which is, like Pooh the Wise says, a moment that is better than the best.
There are many, many more pearls of wisdom that Pooh has mouthed, and some of them can be found here.
If it's too much to take in at one time:
“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
