Last night, I found myself looking up Winnie-the-Pooh quotes. I happened upon a quote by A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, and then decided to just keep looking up more. I had forgotten how many great ones there were (the title of this essay, for example).
I’ve done this before with Winnie-the-Pooh. I find so many of them to be just beautiful. You can check it out for yourself if you’ve never read the books.
I keep referencing the books. Most people, such as me, have only seen the Disney films. But Winnie-the-Pooh initially came from a series of books and poetry collections by author A. A. Milne.
When I was reading these last night, I remembered that the way Pooh and Christopher Robin, or Pooh and Piglet, talk about loving each other just makes me feel warm inside. This is probably why I stayed up “past my bedtime” reading quotations from the books. I just got caught up in it.
It gives me a similar feeling to when I read touching strips of Calvin & Hobbes, my oft-referenced favorite comic strip.
For some reason, there’s something about the way love is expressed both in Winnie-the-Pooh and Calvin & Hobbes that gets to me. Both seem to define love worlds better than all the sappy love movies, stories, and poems put together.
I had to think about this for a second before I understood why I felt this way. I noticed the feeling before I noticed the reason.
But I think that the reason comes from the characters: both Winnie-the-Pooh and Calvin & Hobbes have a small child whose best friend is an animal (an animal whose very existence to the world outside of the small child is arguable). The love and bond expressed here is unconditional. All of us who are, or were, pet owners know this kind of love. I know I still think the world of my first dog, Spike, even though it’s been 6 years since he died.
But I got Spike when I was five years old. Children who grow up with animals grow up with a best friend who loves them unconditionally. You never really fight with a dog the way you fight with a sibling. A dog never really hurts your feelings or asks for much more than to be let out, fed, pet, and played with.
There’s already tons of writing out there pertaining to the many, many pros of pet ownership. I know I’m not breaking any new grounds here.
And in Winnie-the-Pooh and Calvin & Hobbes, the little boy characters love their talking animal friends more than anything in the world. Now, in both cases, the animals are their best friend, not their pet. But, I know that when I was six years old, I wouldn’t have considered Spike my pet either. He was my best friend.
I admire the way that children tend to look at the world. Sure, as you get older you definitely need to mature, and take on more adult responsibilities. You have to experience a lot of the downfalls that exist in this world, and that exist between people. You have to know how to deal with these downfalls because, even though you don’t want them to, they’ll come up time and time again. And you have to be ready for them.
But a child doesn’t (or shouldn’t at the very least) have these feelings yet. A child looks at the world in awe and amazement. And, many times, a child with a pet will look at his or her pet with an unconditional, unwavering love.
Read the Raccoon Story in Calvin & Hobbes (seriously…READ IT!), or this famous quote from Winnie-the-Pooh:
“Pooh, promise me you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I am a hundred.”
Pooh thought for a little.
“How old shall I be then?”
“Ninety-nine.”
Pooh nodded. “I promise,” he said.
Both the Raccoon Story and that quote show how love is through a child’s eyes: unconditional, and untainted by all the bad experiences we feel, see, and witness as we get older.
For better or worse, I, for some reason, never really developed the lackluster uncertainty or jaded look on love (or for this world) that most people my age have. Again, I’m not saying this makes me a better person, there are certainly many cons that go along with this.
But I just can’t watch the snow fall outside and not smile just as wide as I must have the first time I watched snow falling from my window’s view.
I can’t think of love without thinking of it the same way I did for Spike, or that Calvin & Hobbes and Pooh and Christopher Robin have for one another. To me, love is beautiful. Bad experiences shouldn’t taint it as a whole.
Think about it: we’ve all picked up a piece of fruit, say an apple, we thought we were going to enjoy. We couldn’t wait to eat that damn apple! But then we noticed that it was bruised, or soggy. It was past its prime, and you couldn’t eat it anymore. Maybe we noticed this before we took a bite, or maybe we took a bite and got that sour, awful taste in our mouths.
Now, most of us have experienced this in relationships too. We’ve been with people that we started going out with because we had hoped for the best, but the longer it went on, the more proverbial (I sure hope) bruises we noticed on the relationship itself. We had to throw it away.
But, with apples, we don’t swear off apples once we have a bad one, do we? I know I’ve had bad apples, and I don’t just say “GOOD APPLES DON’T EXIST, GUYS!” We know that there are great apples out there, perfect apples.
But how come we have this attitude on love? How come as we grow older, we believe that all our bad experiences indicate that true love doesn’t exist? Sure, there’s the argument that we are more emotionally attached to a relationship than a piece of fruit, therefore the emotional bruising that goes on in a relationship hurts us more than just biting into a bad apple.
But our attachments don’t define the existence of something. Yes, being hurt in a relationship is awful. It’s something that can stay with you your whole life. But don’t give up on love! Just because someone wasn’t right for you doesn’t mean that there’s no one out there that is. One bad apple doesn’t mean that every time you get an apple for the rest of your life, it’ll just be sour and bruised because THAT’S JUST HOW APPLES ARE AND ALWAYS WILL BE!!
Nope.
If you were lucky enough to be a pet owner as a child, you know this feeling: the feeling of intense joy from both parties loving one another. The feeling that you know you’d do everything you could to protect the other party, and that you will always, ALWAYS love them.
This kind of love is the kind of love that exists in Calvin and Hobbes, and in Winnie-the-Pooh. Bill Watterson and A. A. Milne did an excellent job of bringing this untainted world view to readers, which is why, in my opinion, both Calvin & Hobbes and Winnie-the-Pooh can be enjoyed by children and adults alike. Children understand it. Adults revisit it.
This is why I said before that I believe that Mr. Watterson and Mr. Milne better showcased the beauty of love than did all those sappy movies, books, and poems. And, believe me, I do love most of those too!
But they don’t hit it right on the head the way a boy talking to a tiger or a bear do. And I think that’s because these stories remind us that unconditional love does exist. For some reason, as we get older we still understand this with animals, but it’s either cheesy or lame or naïve if we think about this kind of love for a person. But these stories, in which the animals can talk, show us that it is still possible. If we read these stories as adults, it makes us feel so warm because it brings us back.
We know our pets would hug us and say “Don’t worry” when we said to them “But don’t you go anywhere.” It reminds us it’s possible. It shows us how beautiful this world can be, and makes us think that we can find someone out there to be the Hobbes to our Calvin at the end of the Raccoon Story (seriously…READ IT!!!)
Loving Calvin & Hobbes my whole life is probably a big reason as to why I never did give up that part of me that still feels that way. In lots of ways, I am just a big kid. I’m in love with love, and snow, and macaroni and cheese. And if that’s wrong, well, you can tell me I’m wrong all you want.
I’ll be eating Velveeta Shells & Cheese with a huge smile on my face if you need me.
Keep the love alive, everyone.
- Mike
