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Past Thought for the week messages Ramblings of a bear with little brain!
Past Thought for the week messages Ramblings of a bear with little brain! | Ramblings of a bear with little brain! |
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If , when you read this quirky title, your thoughts immediately came up with the suggestion: ‘That’s got to be Winnie the Pooh!’ you’re absolutely right. Full marks! But what on earth has this got to do with my purportedly spiritual musings on the subject of food, you may ask? Well, read on…. I happened, this morning, to come across the following verse in Proverbs: Have you found honey? Eat only as much as you need. —Proverbs 25:16. So being, at times, a lateral thinker, I found myself musing about how Pooh bear could perhaps have benefitted from such wisdom. It might have kept him from many a sorry fate, such as falling out of trees and getting stung by bees! Anyway, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of nostalgia, I found myself doing a web-search on ‘Pooh Bear – honey quotes,’ and actually discovered a wealth of sayings, observations and anecdotes which illustrate beautifully various aspects of my teachings. For your interest, therefore, and hopefully to bring a smile to your face, here a just a few of his gems, courtesy, of course, of A.A. Milne… “"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” For a bear with little brain, that is an amazing piece of self-awareness which I think many of us can identify with. I have felt the same way about croissants. Throughout my dieting days, when they were accounted to me as forbidden food, I could think of nothing more delectable. That rich combination of fat and sugar, combined with the fluffiness of the puff pastry and the lashings of jam and butter wedged precariously in the half incision – which was all my blunt knife could ever achieve without demolishing the whole into a mountain of crumbs – was the nearest thing to heaven I could ever imagine! And yet, I have to admit, the experience of eating one, never did quite come up to the standard of my expectations. I have concluded that I liked the idea of eating croissant far more than the actual taste. For you it is probably something completely different that tantalises your taste buds, but it is strange that when we take away the forbidden element, the food we obsess about definitely seems to loose its magnetism. For me, now, croissants haven’t merely lost their magnetism; they’ve also lost their appeal and I would actually choose a good quality yoghourt over them any day! On a somewhat different note, how about this quote: ’“Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, "Honey or condensed milk with your bread?" he was so excited that he said, "Both," and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, "But don't bother about the bread, please."’ To laugh is to identify! Many of us have played this kind of game. ‘Ice-cream or cream with your fruit salad Madam?’ ‘Oh, both please – but better go easy on the fruit!’ What games we play to justify our indulgences! I don’t think any further comment is needed. And my final quote: ‘I'm so rumbly in my tumbly, time for something sweet!!!!' Pooh needed to learn that the ‘rumbly’ in his ‘tumbly’ wasn’t true hunger and that, even if it was, something sweet wasn’t the answer. It might give the pleasurable sensation of a short-lived sugar rush but he’d probably have ended up with type 2 diabetes! Poor Pooh, he wasn’t very health-aware, was he? Anyway, God has given us all things richly to enjoy, and honey is certainly better than refined sugar. All things in moderation, then, and remember to take on board the verse in Proverbs which sparked off these ramblings: 'Have you found honey? Eat only as much as you need.' Bon appétit!
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