At the end of a Winnie the Pooh movie Christopher Robin is going off to school, and he tells Pooh that he won’t be able to do nothing anymore.
“What’s doing nothing?” Pooh Bear asks.
“Well,” answers Christopher Robin, “It’s when grown-ups ask you want you are going to do, and you say, ‘Nothing,’ and then you go out and do it.”
Remember being a kid and lying on grass cool against your back and staring up at the sky and being entranced by the shapes of the clouds? I remember being in my crib--taking a nap supposedly—and calling out, “Momma, the sky’s moving.”
We watched the 1938 movie You Can’t Take It With You with Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, and Jean Arthur, about a house full of eccentrics who are doing whatever they want. The Momma is writing a novel because a typewriter was delivered to the house 8 years ago, one daughter dances all the time, the little man Grandpa picked up from the accounting office, makes up things, a toy bunny that raises us out of a hat, masks, Three old guys in the basement are making fireworks. Thirty five years ago Grandpa, on the way to being a corporate giant, rode the elevator up to his office, decided he wasn’t having any fun there, and rode it back down, never to return. Now he collects stamps and appraises stamp collections and gets paid for it. Of course trouble comes, but Grandpa takes it all in stride— “Things turn out,” he says, “as they usually do.”
DD asks me how we can live that way?
Any suggestions?
