5 Quick Things #369 🐝

having no brain, anticipation, not very how, & forest corners

May 23, 2025

Hey there,

Holy COW has it been a busy week! I won’t bore you with the details because no one likes hearing someone drone on and on about how busy they are… Just trust me, it’s a lot of nonstop going around here. And this evening I’m the speaker at a graduation, which means I have a lot to do today again, so let’s just get right to it, shall we?

All year long I’ve taught students words shared from brilliant minds — some virtuous, others less so — words from folks that deserve a side-eye, like Nietzsche, Marx, and Camus, but also words of wisdom like those from Eliot, Lewis, O’Connor, and Solzhenitsyn. However, we ended the year with one of the brilliant sages of our time, so in my speech tonight I’m using those maxims as my springboard: I’m speaking, of course, about Winnie the Pooh and his companions. Five of my thoughts for high school graduates are below.

Christopher Robin and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood, circa 1920s

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. “Pooh,’ said Rabbit kindly, ‘you haven’t any brain.’ ‘I know,’ said Pooh humbly.’” …When you’re a senior in high school, it’s quite easy to feel like you Know Things. You’re the oldest possible high school student there is, and you’ve been around the block — you’ve been doing school for thirteen years now, and some of you are even legal adults already. But you’ll soon find out how Very Little you actually know, and for those of you going to college in the fall, you’ll be freshmen all over again: the lowest on the totem pole once more. You’re about to find out how much you don’t know, in the best possible way. If there’s a collective secret kept among adults, it’s this: there is no secret knowledge bestowed upon us once we hit certain milestones, like graduations, weddings, parenthood, or ages ending in zero. You learn as you go. In most cases, life experience is the best teacher, and often those experiences look like Mistakes. The best posture to take with this truth is, of course, a humble one. Be prepared to be humbled again and again as you venture into adulthood and are faced with the reality at how little you actually know. It’s not your fault; it’s just how it works. God made it so that we learn by doing, by watching and listening to those older than us, and by taking steps of faith. You’re all brilliant students, I know — but in the big scheme of things, you haven’t any brain.
2. “‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.’” …I can look back and see that for much of my life, I lived in anticipation for the next stage on the horizon. When I was in high school, I was so ready to be done and get to college. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to finally graduate. Once I graduated and, in my case, went out on the mission field, I was eager to find my future husband. Once I got married, I couldn’t wait to have kids. And when they were little, I just wanted them to get older so they weren’t so much work. But one day, it suddenly hit me that my little kids were getting all grown up, and that the cliché was true: it all goes by so fast. Now I’m just a few years away from being an empty nester and my mind is blown. Make sure you don’t wish away this time — even this transitional summer, when you’ve finished high school now but you’re not quite at the next thing. Savor the days of much freedom and little real responsibility. After all, it’s often the anticipation — that’s the word Winnie the Pooh was thinking of, by the way — that’s more enjoyable than the event itself. Enjoy the anticipation of adulthood, whatever that looks like for you right now: college, a gap year, the work world, an internship. Relish that feeling of Big Things on the horizon, not quite here yet. Don’t worry: taxes and bills and back pain and gray hair will come to you soon enough.
3. Pooh also says, “A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” …Once you have more freedom than you’ve probably yet had in your life up to now, you’ll find you can make all sorts of choices in your daily life. You can stay up until 2 a.m. playing video games on a school night. You can sit around a giant bonfire with friends and jump over the flames. You can eat pancakes for dinner three nights in a row. You can sleep in until noon and skip classes. Every now and then, some relaxation is warranted, but be careful not to abuse your freedom and turn it into a revelry of vices. Freedom is meant for good — as we’ve said in class, real freedom is the ability to live according to a right order. Your health choices will catch up with you (am I right, fellow adults?). At the same time, Pooh also says, “It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’” Don’t be so dogmatic about self-improvement and pedantic about higher education that you forget to simply enjoy lunch. After all, “Piglet said, ‘When you wake up in the morning, Pooh, what's the first thing you say to yourself?’ ‘What's for breakfast?’ said Pooh. ‘What do you say, Piglet?’ ‘I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting to-day?’ said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s the same thing,’ he said.”
4. And yet another time: “‘And how are you?’ said Winnie-the-Pooh. Eeyore shook his head from side to side. ‘Not very how,’ he said. ‘I don't seem to have felt at all how for a long time.’ ‘Dear, dear,’ said Pooh, ‘I’m sorry about that. Let's have a look at you.’” …There will be a time when you just don’t feel so very how. You’ll regret whatever choices you’re currently super excited about having made: you’ll be hundreds of miles away from your home and wonder what on earth you’re doing in such a cold, desolate place. You’ll want to hit the easy button and not do hard things, because spoiler alert: they’re hard. Going to college is hard. Entering the work force is hard. Good things never come by easily — after all, that pesky vice, acedia (a fancy word for sloth, you’ll remember) has a fair number of highbrow definitions, but my favorite is the simple, ‘a sadness that good things are hard.’ We live in a broken world, and part of adulthood is running into the reality, again and again, that the sort of life Christ has called us to is a hard one. After all, we’re told by Jesus to not be surprised when we suffer — in other words, suffering is just part of life. But suffering isn’t without cause, because we can unite our suffering with Christ’s on the cross for our further sanctification and readiness for heaven. In the meantime, the reality of life can indeed just be so very hard. One remedy for this, like Eeyore’s friend Pooh reminds us, is to check in with a friend so they can ‘have a look at you.’ And when you’re feeling so very lonely, or frustrated, or angry, or depressed and anxious, it sounds counter-intuitive, but believe it or not, one of the best remedies is to roll up your sleeves and serve. Get your focus off of yourself. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you who needs something that you can give — and then practice the corporeal work of mercy by being the hands and feet of Christ for someone else. There’s something genuinely freeing about remembering that life is not ultimately about you, and that there’s a certain quiet joy and hope, even in the midst of our own loneliness, that comes from our being useful to God. After all, “Piglet was so excited at the idea of being Useful that he forgot to be frightened any more, and when Rabbit went on to say that Kangas were only Fierce during the winter months, being at other times of an Affectionate Disposition, he could hardly sit still, he was so eager to begin being useful at once.”
5. And finally, remember — no matter how introverted you are (like me), we humans are actually made for community. God has hard-wired us to need each other, to thrive in families, and to build cultures and communities with our neighbors. So take Christopher Robin’s advice to Pooh: “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” …It takes hard, hard work to build real community, but it’s about the realest, most humane thing there is, and it’s a lifeline that makes the difference between merely surviving and genuinely thriving. It’s so tempting to wait to be invited to parties, to wait to be asked out on dates, to default to YouTube in your dorm room unless someone drags you out to the courtyard where people are hanging out. Don’t wait for that — you be that person for others. Don’t wait in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. Go to them. After all, as Pooh says, “It's so much more friendly with two,” and as Piglet says, “If you weren’t you, then we’d all be a bit less, we.” And Lord-willing, as you continue to hit further milestones in life (your high school graduation being merely the first real adult rite of passage out of many, hopefully), you’ll be able to say what you can say today as you look at the tail end of your thirteen years of childhood education — what Pooh said to Christopher Robin as he was heading off to his first year of school: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Big Dumb Eyes, by Nate Bargatze

Quotable 💬

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

― Winnie the Pooh (by way of A.A. Milne)

If you traveled to the past and had the option to thwart a major historic catastrophe... Would you? ⏳

This was built off the previous letter’s question, and the clear but also impossible answer is ‘no.’ We’ve seen enough sci-fi films and shows involving time travel to know what happens when you mess with stuff, no matter how well-intentioned.

No: 53.6%
Yes: 46.4%