Poohs Grand Adventure

So last night I watched "Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin" What a good movie! But it made me think about growing up. In the movie the message that they were trying to tell kids was somthin like, "things aren't as scary as they seem", or "you can do anything if you believe in yourself", stuff like that, but the message I got out of it was very different. All through the movie they have these amazing adventures; they run from monsters, pass through a hedge of thorns(sleeping beauty style), piglet almost gets kidnapped by butterflies, they fall off a cliff, and then have to travel through an endless labrinth of caves testing each to the edge of their abilities. IT'S AWESOME!!! But after they find Christopher Robin (yes, I spoiled the ending, but its a disney, you knew they'd find him), they go back through all the places where they had their adventures and its not big, and adventursome anymore.

The cliff they fell off of is now about 5 feet deep. The hedge of thorns, a thistle patch. The endless labrinth, a small rock formation. And I suppose if I was four I would realize that they're telling us that once we overcome our fears, they now longer are as large and looming, or at the very least, things are always easier with Christopher Robin.

But I'm not four. So it made me remember all of those awesome adventures you have when your a kid. Crawling under the covers on your parents big water bed becomes an adventure through the caves where the ground is ever slipping from beneath you feet. You stay under for hours always crawling along, but never reach the end, it just keeps going. Or, you build a massive hill in your sandbox, and create a sprawling tunnel city for all of your talking cars. The list goes on...Climbing trees, counting stars, going down a slide, walking along the fence, even just laying in the grass all become amazing adventures when you're young. But when you look back on them now, they have lost their luster. Trying to hide underneath your parent's covers no longer works as well. No longer can you crawl behind the easy chair and sit for hours watching the ten commandments, or reading boxcar children. Why is that? Is there some rule that once you hit 4 foot, life no longer holds any adventure? Some untold reason that maturity suddenly means a loss of that childhood innocence?

The more I think about this, the more I think that maybe I learned the lesson the film makers were trying to teach me. When we are young, what drives us to all these adventures? It's because we don't know what will happen, we fear, on some small degree, the places our feet may take us. As we get older though, we understand more and more, its like Marie Curie said, "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." The more we understand something, the less we fear it. Crawling under the sheets isn't as scary when we are big, we lose that anticipation, the joy of discovering things unknown, seeing things unseen. I miss it. Discovery. Yes, the pool of knowledge is always bigger then the stuff we know, but doesn't it seem like all important stuff we already know? I don't ever ever want to grow up, but i'm scared, scared that maybe I already have

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."