The Virtues of Nothing | Christopher Robin (2018)
Caution, this article may contain spoilers for Christopher Robin, proceed at your own risk.
Three of my sisters were kind enough to take me to see Christopher Robin (2018) as a late birthday gift, it was a delightful film that respected the material as it deserved.
As a child my mother read to me the original Winnie the Pooh books, growing up I watched the films and television programs (among my favorite will always be a Very Merry Pooh Year). My family says I am very much like Rabbit, and I admit that my OCD nature does tend that way.
The stories of the Hundred Acre Wood, and it’s principle characters, holds a special place in my heart and I was very excited to see where an adult Christopher Robin fit in to the story.
As a quick summary, Christopher Robin has grown up, has a wife and child, but is always working hard at his job and trying to keep his department from being shut down. His life is shaken when he meets Pooh in London, who says their friends in the Hundred Acre Woods are missing and he needs help to find them.
Christopher takes Pooh back to the Hundred Acre Woods, finds their friends and reclaims a piece of his childhood, but still goes back to the grind in London to meet a deadline. He accidentally leaves behind his very important papers. Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eyeore join with Christopher’s daughter Madeline to return the papers to Christopher in London.
The main theme of the film is losing sense of priorities as we age. The world is a busy place and while our responsibilities are important, they should not come at the cost of replacing what really matters. In the case of Christopher Robin, he finds himself sacrificing his relationship with his wife and daughter to meet the increasing demands of his job.
This film is what I consider a prime example of why films should exist, and why good storytelling conveys an idea better than someone trying to explain what the idea is. It presents the theme artfully, showing you how and why Christopher has grown up, illustrating how he isn’t selfish and unkind, but simply trying to do what he thinks is right, though at the cost of his family.
Wonder
When Pooh shows up, he presents the challenge to what the protagonist, Christopher Robin, believes about his world. Pooh’s charming wonder at the world around him is contrasted against Robin’s inattention to his surroundings. While in a train ride to Sussex to return Pooh to his home, Pooh spends the time looking out the train window and simply saying what he sees. “Dog.” “Man.” “Cow.” etc.
Losing our sense of wonder when we look at creation, when we see the beauty and impressive craft of life itself and shrug, we start the process of becoming calloused. Creation depicts the glory of God all around us if we take a moment to appreciate its complexity and design. When we cease to wonder at life, we start to become jaded to reality, cynically looking at everything and asking why it matters at all.
Pooh’s innocent lack of guile reminds us to appreciate the wonder we are surrounded by every day. To if nothing else, take a moment to identify the creation we see and give thanks to the Creator that made it.
Identity by Action
When Christopher finds his friends in the Hundred Acre Woods, they are hiding from the Heffelumps, creatures that feast on the fear and worry of others. They don’t believe that he’s Christopher Robin, beyond his appearance having changed with age, they disbelieve him because he says, “There’s no such things as heffelumps.” and Christopher Robin would never say that.
To earn their belief, with the help of Eyeore, Christopher Robin proceeds to play-act that he is vanquishing a heffelump, just out of eyesight. After “defeating” the heffelump, his old friends acknowledge that it really is Christopher Robin after all. The humor of the scene is evident, and it conveys an immeasurable truth we often ignore.
Our identity is claimed on the basis of actions, not words. We say we are just about anything, but without the actions to support them it becomes meaningless titles. Writers are writers because they write, not because they say so on their profile biographies.
Times will challenge us to prove our identities, to do what is required if we wish to retain them. We cannot say we are “Christopher Robin,” unless we are willing to fight a heffelump to prove it.
The Virtue of Nothing
Pooh’s most repeated quote in the film is, “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.” It’s quaint, it’s a Poohism that will adorn many a teeshirt and coffee mug, it’s also remarkably true.
When we run around doing everything, we have a hard time finishing anything. Our minds become overloaded, running again and again into a brick wall. When faced with a mental block, or a struggle in one area of our lives, the best thing you can do is walk away from it.
In Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Maria Konnikova writes, “When we switch gears, we in effect move the problem that we have been trying to solve from the conscious brain to our unconscious. While we may think we doing something else — and indeed, our attentional networks become engaged in something else — our brains don’t actually stop work on the original problem.”
Nothing can be just as much of an activity as something. We can while doing nothing, see the beauty of the world around us, wonder at the majesty of the creation. Nothing can be times of peace and rest, to pursue stillness of tranquility. Walks outdoors, Konnikova later suggests, is an ideal way of handling a problem. Nature, it turns out has a remarkable way of facilitating feelings of well being and problem solving.
Doing nothing can be good, even great at times, but are you doing nothing with the people that matter most?
The Priority of People
Time is our most valuable resource, not only is it finite, we don’t know how how much of it we have. Each moment we live could very well be our last, and to compensate we try to wring as much of what we consider to be most important out of each of those precious seconds.
Doing nothing, to disengage from actively pursuing a goal that we have, has a cost. If we do nothing, spending the time we have in nothing of great or weighty consequence, we should spend it with the people we care about most.
If you can purposefully be content to spend a day, or even an hour, doing nothing with someone, they have a priority in your life. Christopher Robin finds this when he has to reorient his thinking after his visit to the Hundred Acre Woods. When asked innocently by Pooh why he spends more time with his briefcase than his daughter, Robin is taken aback.
As a film, Christopher Robin is not trying to tell adults that they need to find their inner child, or to guilt them for working hard. It is to remind us that the time we spend doing nothing is only as important as the people we do nothing with.
This article was originally published at terrancelayhew.com on 9/03/18
