Young at Heart: Lessons From The Hundred Acre Wood, Old Blue Eyes, and Zen Masters
Recently, while scrolling Twitter, I was ambushed by the trailer for Winnie The Pooh: Blood & Honey. The film is a reimagining of A. A. Milne’s lovable, honey-obsessed yellow bear. In this version, Pooh and his pal Piglet are pissed off that Christopher Robin has abandoned them for college, so they become serial killers.
The trailer looks bad. Not subjectively bad but objectively bad. To be honest, I’m not even sure it’s a real trailer. I don’t really care. The importance of this horror film (made possible because Winnie The Pooh's intellectual property is entering public domain) is that it reminded me of the 2018 film Christopher Robin starring Ewan McGregor. This more traditional narrative, like so many Winnie The Pooh stories, is about growing up. Christopher Robin (McGregor) changes from a little kid who loves his toys and uses his imagination to explore the Hundred-Acre Wood into a businessman with no time for anything but his career. It’s a classic tale we’ve all heard 100 times, with different characters and in different settings. It’s a cautionary story intended to remind us what really matters—not our career achievements or how much money we make, but how and how often we spend time with the people we care about most.
I have an affinity for Pooh. These stories were some of my favorites as a child. When I was visiting my family for Christmas in 2018 we watched this film the night before I returned to Brooklyn. It had a significant impact on me—much more than I anticipated. What made this story different from others like it was the emphasis on how adult life changes our perception of the world. A holiday staple for my wife and I is Jingle All The Way, a story about a dad who forgets to get his kid a present because he is too busy working. I love Jingle All The Way, but it doesn’t really explore the reasons why adults tend to deprioritize things that felt so obviously important as children. The transformation is just taken for granted. Not so with Christopher Robin, which is more like Peter Pan in that it acknowledges a difference in the way children and adults interpret their environment. And adults aren’t always better at it. They are often far worse.
I would say that I am somewhat of a corny, cheesy guy. I like slogans and bumper stickers because they are helpful reminders in times of doubt. I think all the time about my dad telling me to smell the roses, or to avoid comparing how I feel on the inside with how others appear on the outside. These are just sayings, but for me they are imbued with context and meaning from the conversations in which he mentioned them. They are shorthand for entire life philosophies.
It’s something my mom often said, though, that is the focus of this essay. She always said not to grow up so fast. A very Pooh statement, if I do say so myself. Maybe your parents said something similar. What she meant by this—or maybe more importantly, what I took from it—is that there are simple joys and values that are associated with your childhood and your youth, and if you aren’t careful, you will lose touch with them. Growing up means more responsibilities and doing things we have to do, rather than things we want to do. It can change our perception of what is more important and what our priorities should be. Wealth and status and climbing the ladder are so glorified in American culture there’s a risk of forgetting that things like careers are supposed to be a means to fulfillment and enable us to enjoy time with our family and friends. There’s nothing inherently wonderful about working a lot. But again: perception of what matters changes, largely due to societal influences.
An enormous part of growing up is learning who you are, which includes beliefs and assumptions about the rules that govern human behavior. Even if we don’t think we have a defined, endorsed model of the world and the people in it, we do. Psychologists often call these “naive theories.” We may not consciously be aware that we are acting in accordance with presumptions about other people, but we are nonetheless.
A good test, to me, of when an ideology or belief system has jumped the shark is when your adherence to the system trumps the underlying objectives. Sticking with economics, the true purpose of studying an economy is to improve the equitable distribution of goods and services for a given population. When I hear things like “full employment doesn’t mean everyone has a job, and actually if everyone had a job, it would be bad,” it feels like we have lost sight of what actually matters, i.e. improving people’s lives. In the United States, it’s ingrained into the collective psyche that the nation is a meritocracy and that hard work is the most important, most treasured of all values. This leads to perverse explanations of social phenomena. For example, seemingly every single time there’s an economic downturn, people try to blame it on the idea nobody wants to work anymore rather than wondering if maybe our economic and political systems don’t work because they fail to protect and serve the most vulnerable while encouraging greed and rapaciousness.
I think about the obsession with hustle culture over the last decade or so as the ultimate manifestation of confusing the means to a good life with actually living a good life. Bragging about working a lot not because you enjoy the work, per se and find it fulfilling, but because working in and of itself is good, is the ultimate example of a mutated cultural value infecting a society. It also would horrify Winnie The Pooh, who was fond of saying, “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.”
I doubt my mom was thinking about all of this as she warned me about growing up too fast. But the seeds were there. The most important lessons are actually pretty simple, and we learn them as kids—being nice to other people, learning as much as we can, having fun. They seem almost so simple when day to day life is so challenging and complex that they can’t possibly be the true guideposts.
So going into 2019, after watching Christopher Robin reconnect with his inner child, my New Year’s resolution was to “not grow up all the way.” I wrote a journal entry about how people seem to harden as they grow older—more rigid, callous, and cold. The world wears people down, it seems. For Christopher Robin—and many, many others—it was his career. Misfortunes and slights, unfair treatment and undesired outcomes, failures and shortcomings—we all experience these things to varying degrees, and if you don’t guard against it, they are a natural fertilizer out of which fear, resentment and cynicism grow.
I’ve written previously about Jean Piaget’s theory of development that posits we all have mental models of how the world works and we can either assimilate new information into our current model or we can accommodate the new information by modifying the model. In either case, we are seeking an equilibrium in which the various aspects of our world make sense. What’s interesting, though, is how children are more willing to change their mental models than adults.
Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who was virtually unknown in the West until relatively recently, had a dialectical model of development. Heavily influenced by Hegel and Marx, he suggested as we develop, our models of the world are challenged by our environments, and the synthesis of our outlook and societal influence determine who we are. He said “A colt is already a horse but a baby is only a candidate to become a human being,” meaning that so much of who we are is a result of societal influences—in fact, they are required.
What do these things have to do with Winnie The Pooh? As we grow up, we are subject to more and more societal forces. Religious, cultural, and political ideologies. As humans we want to fit in and are made aware of the costs to run with certain crowds—dress a certain way, talk a certain way, act a certain way. We struggle to integrate these myriad societal requirements into our identity and sense of self, all which muddy the first few simple lessons most of us learn as kids: Be nice to people and have fun. We guide kids toward what we want them to learn, and when we encourage them, we’re supporting a natural inclination toward progress they don’t even know they have. But that engine is there in all of us waiting for someone to turn the key.
But eventually, we just want to live life. We get tired of learning and our curiosity wanes. Some of this is wisdom that comes with experience (not every trend is worth knowing, not every social network is worth joining) but some of it is simply calcification.
It seems no matter what I set out to write, I eventually come back to the notion that growth is essential for life. If we become set in our ways and refuse to draw knowledge and insight from different places, we become rigid and stale. We also become resentful and annoyed. The older we get, the narrower our sources become. We lose what the Zen Buddhists call “Beginner’s Mind,” an inherent openness and curiosity about the world.
So, yeah, I think watching entertainment intended for kids and young adults is important. It’s a good reminder of the important priorities in life that are easy to lose sight of as we’re bombarded with all kinds of values, incentives, belief systems, and ideologies as we grow up. They have the power to help keep us grounded and humble while slyly opening our minds to new ideas and better ways of thinking. Everyone from Winnie The Pooh to Frank Sinatra to Zen Buddhist masters place an enormous value on staying not physically young, but young at heart. Seems wise to me.