A Road Less Travelled

I love reading Winnie-the-Pooh. My mom read it to us when I was younger and then I read them to myself. I finally got copies of the two books and read them. They were as good as I remember them to be. I should have remembered I would cry at the end, but I didn’t until I was. The end of the story still has the power to make me cry. I cried the first time I read it and I cried this time. Nicely predictable. In the last story the animals say goodbye to Christopher Robin. They don’t know how, but they know things are changing. Christopher Robin hasn’t been around as much as usual and they know that soon he will go away. Eeyore writes him a poem and they all go to present it. As Christopher Robin reads it one by one the animals trickle off until only Pooh is left. Christopher Robin and Pooh go to an enchanted place from where you can see the whole world and you can never tell how many trees there are no matter how exactly you count. They sit in the enchanted place and Christopher Robin says goodbye. See, he’s growing up and he won’t be able to do just nothing anymore. Pooh promises to remember him forever and they run off to play while they still can. And I cry every single time. I know our culture reveres youth and I know that is wrong. I know Peter Pan is not someone I want for a role model and I can feel bad for him and the lost boys. But growing up is hard. Life hurts you and you never heal back up completely. Tough times touch you more and there is no hedge of protection around you anymore. Instead you have to man the wall and put a hedge around someone else. And that is hard. I remember when I had to grow up. The transition had been coming for a while and I was getting ready to switch from child to adult, but the actual click happened in an instant. One moment I was an old child and the next I had to be a young adult. And then I moved here and I had to help keep the hedge up around the children so they wouldn’t have to know how bad life was when they weren’t ready for it. And it was really hard. But growing up isn’t all bad. Not by a long shot. I look at Noah and sometimes I feel really bad for him. He is incapable of being truly joyful and he can’t even be happy for very long at a time. If the slightest thing goes against his wishes his happiness is gone. He is grumpy most of the time. Part of training children is teaching them how to be happy when the world is being the world around you. And part of being an adult is having learned that. I can be happier and enjoy life better than Noah can. I enjoy more of life than he understands exists. I enjoy more of life than Arianna knows exists. The world is bigger for me than it is for them. In some ways I can look at the world through the eyes of a child now that I am a grown up better than a child could. A child’s take on things can look charming, but really it’s because he don’t understand everything that’s going on. And he hasn’t learned the magic of life. So I look at the world and try to see magic and I try to feel wonder. It is getting easier the more I practice. And I try to be the one who brings that sense of juvenile where ever I go. I feel childish sometimes, but most people around me enjoy it and some start playing along. When I was an old child I would be too mature to play with baby toys, but now that I grew up I realized that baby toys are fun. I had to grow up to enjoy simple things like a child again. It is hard not to look back at my childhood and wish for those days. Life felt simpler, though it wasn’t really, and I wasn’t so tired. But life wasn’t actually better, it was just different. But growing up isn’t actually saying goodbye to that. It’s just looking at the world through taller eyes. There’s no hedge around you, but that means that now you can actually see the horizon. And you can still go to the enchanted place sometimes and try to count the trees.