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“Promise me you’ll always remember you are braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. ” Christoper Robin to Winne-the-Pooh
For some reason this wonderful quote popped into my head last night as I was thinking about what to share with you today. My beloved sister Judy loved the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and poems by A. A. Milne, and I especially love this quote. There’s so wisdom packed into this one little line!
”… you are braver than you believe” – Are there any among us who wouldn’t like to be braver, bolder, more courageous? Who wouldn’t like an extra dose of courage when it comes to putting our work out into the world, or tackling something we feel is beyond our skill, or risking rejection in order to find our way through the publishing industry’s gatekeepers? And yet, Christopher Robin reminds us that we are all braver than we believe. We can all past past our fears and draw on our untapped wells of courage. We’ve all done this in the past – found courage in difficult time – and we can do it now.
“… you are stronger than you seem” – It’s hard sometimes to do the work we’re called on to do. We have moments of self-doubt. We get discouraged. Things are going well — just perking merrily along – and suddenly, they aren’t. We hit a pothole, we get in a rut – and like Winnie-the-Pooh who gets stuck in a honey pot — we think we’ll never get out. We get slammed by something and think we can’t handle it. And yet, we are all so much more resilient than we think we are, aren’t we? We show this to ourselves and others in so many different ways and yet we think we’re not strong enough. And yet we are.
“… and smarter than you think” – We’d all like to be smarter and sharper, wouldn’t we? We all admire writers who seem to have the wit and the edge to say wonderful things in wonderful ways. We envy the ease with which their words seem to meet the page and startle and amaze. Wouldn’t it be so wonderful to be as clever as they are? To have that exciting, thrilling ability to turn a phrase? And yet, and yet, Christopher Robin reminds us, just as he reminded his beloved Pooh bear, that we are smarter than we give ourselves credit for. We have wisdom, we have experience, we’ve learned life lessons in our own very special ways – we have ways of saying what we need and want to say that are unlike anyone else’s. Yes, we are smarter, wiser, more clever, and more skilled than we think.
So here we are! We are braver, stronger, and smarter than any of us know. Let’s remember this today and every day, as we all write on!
