What day is it?
It’s today, squeaked Piglet.
My favorite day, said Pooh.
Strangely enough, I never watched Pooh as a child, nor did I own any Christopher Robin books or Winnie-branded toys. My liking for the friendly old bear began in high school, when I took an interest in writings by A.A. Milne and as such, discovered that Pooh is just as much about “hunny” as he is about wisdom. It turns out that that silly old bear isn’t all that entirely silly.
I’m incredibly happy to see him and his friends make their way to the big screen in just a couple of weeks, with the premiere of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh on July 16. In the meantime, I leave you with the movie’s beautiful trailer and, with a bit of wisdom by Winnie.
“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known… Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” — A.A. Milne
Will you be watching?
“Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present - and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.”
- Audrey Hepburn
Photo courtesy of LIFE Magazine
Currently Reading: What Would Audrey Do? by Pamela Keogh
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”
And the roses were very much embarrassed.
“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”
- Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943; translated from the French by Richard Howard
‘You have to take risks,’ he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived that moment, that it doesn’t exist — that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists — a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)
“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.” —Mark Twain
The great American writer (genius!) left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death. The time has come.
Will you be picking up a copy?
