current mood: unpondered
top 3 things I want: 2TB hard drive, new shoes, a big dog
chocolate treat of the day: rolos. pure, simple, joyous.
When I was young, one of my favorite childhood characters was Winnie the Pooh. A fat, cuddly ‘ol bear who ate nothing but honey and wore a red t-shirt that was to small for him. I had a stuffed animal pooh bear that was my bedside companion every night and my fellow explorer by day (until my mom lost him, but that’s a different story). When I was 3 I had a Pooh bear themed birthday.*
Now I am old…er. I still like pooh bear. I like him because he ponders things. But he doesn’t ponder them to get smarter or to be wiser. In fact, he often admits that he is a bear of “very little brain”. He likes to use simple words like “how about lunch?”. But he doesn’t ignore things he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t disregard things that are practical either. He lives simply and kindly.
I too like to ponder things. Recently, I’ve been pondering the idea of life and time. What I mean is the concept of time and myself being alive and functioning in this very moment. And why this moment? Why did God choose to have my life occur in this section of time in the grand scheme of history?
Sometimes I have this thought: that people-humanity-has gotten smarter or funnier or more “advanced” over the course of history; like we are some kind of learning robot race that has “developed” over time. But in reality people were probably just as smart or funny now as they were 500 years ago. They were people with feelings, ideas, hands that moved, and blood that flowed. They weren’t like stupid cavemen who beat themselves with rocks or something.
So with this in mind, I then ask myself, “why are these eyes, the eyes I see through?” How come I live in this place right now? If I only get one life-a certain number of breaths to take-why did they start on May 26th 1990? Things are happening to people all over the world right now and they are very real things. A boy in Africa fell and scraped his knee and it hurt. Someone in Brazil is eating a sandwich and thinking about a soccer match. George Clooney is somewhere doing something right now. The fact that at some point in time, I was six years old. I was a six-year-old girl who had six-year-old thoughts and did six-year-old things. But now, I’m a 21-year-old girl. I’m still me, but I’m different.
This idea of seeing me, and my life, outside of myself….the idea that time is not permanent. I think we often act like it is. It’s a marvelous mystery–time.
I’ve been expressing these ponderings that I’ve had to the Maker. He hasn’t answered my questions. But like Pooh, I don’t need to understand them, because I am a creature of very little brain and like small words like “how about coffee?”. I just enjoy recognizing these things and pondering them. I’m content in my lack of understanding.
It’s not that I don’t seek understanding, I just accept the fact that there are things I may never understand. In this life time, or in the life outside of time.
Perhaps I have given you a few things to ponder. So I shall leave you with this quote. It doesn’t really have to do with what I’ve talked about, but it’s still great.
“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
-Winnie-the-Pooh
*I only know I had this birthday because of pictures in a photo album I have at home. It was probably the best birthday I ever had.
And here I thought I was the only one who liked Rolos. Good stuff, by the by. It reminds me of a book I read last year, and, of course, one of my favorite quotes from Lord of the Rings, “[Frodo] laid his his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.”