Pooh’s Honey Pot

I awoke today with many things on my mind, things I wanted to write about: why I like homosexual café owners kicking out Christians; how yellow people see themselves in a world where “yellow people” is a description, not a hate crime; and why Milan Kundera was right about Eden, “where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.”

Here is the full Kundera quotation:

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

I got caught up in that thought today without realizing it, as I began the morning with breakfast time, not on a hillside with a dog, but on a rooftop with my lovely wife. From this vantage point, the horizon (external and internal) was dominated by a most gentle, evolving, peculiarly hazy sunrise. The view was blurry in a way that seemed to obliterate even the possibility of detail, particularity, or anything at all to grab onto or do. It was a vision of idleness, which, if pursued with sincerity and seriousness, is not wasted time, but the obviation of Time in favor of the mind’s quiet, sempiternal darting around, in defiance of clocks and responsibilities. 

Luckily, this mood hit on the last day of an extended national holiday break in Korea, a Monday which also happens to be Canadian Thanksgiving. A perfect day for this expat in Korea to embrace the blur of free thought without a practical goal, i.e., idling.

And the sun at the heart of this morning’s inspiringly pleasing blur set the tone of the day by reminding me of another model idler, Winnie the Pooh, or more specifically of his famous honey pot. Here are a few photos of the sunrise, which I hope will have almost as pleasing an effect on you as the real sight had on me. To help your philosophical spirit along, I’ve included a few suitable quotations from the original honey pot creator himself, A. A. Milne.

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

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

“Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”

“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Think it over, think it under.”

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