This week, A.A. Milne, the father of Winnie The Pooh, celebrated his (posthumous) 132nd Birthday. Pooh himself turns 88 this year, having now bestowed his infinite wisdom on easy SIX generations. The inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, Owl, and of course Winnie The Pooh himself have been mutual friends of our great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children alike, and that itself is a pretty rare thing.
But of all the beloved children’s characters of the past century, Winnie the Pooh, “a bear of very little brains” (and his friends) have managed to bequeath invaluable lessons and life skills the withstand the test of time, even inspiring a plethora of academic material, from John Tyerman Williams’ Pooh and the Philosophers : In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-The-Pooh, to Frederic Crew’s satirical The Pooh Perplex : A Freshman Casebook, to Roger E. Allen’s series on Pooh and the gang tackling Business, Success, and Management, to perhaps the most famous and existential Pooh examination of them all, Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh. It appears Pooh’s wisdom knows no boundaries.
So with that in mind, I thought what better way to celebrate A.A. Milne’s 132nd than to pay homage to the great life lessons he and his work left us with.
