So, I recently watched the new Christopher Robin movie with Ewan McGregor. As expected, it was completely adorable, and made me tear up at some parts. Basically, the premise of the movie is that Christopher Robin is all grown up with a wife, Evelyn, and daughter, Madeline, and in a job that he hates. Having returned from the war (WWII) and now working as an efficiency expert at Winslow Luggages, he has been given the task of making cuts for the company, including firing some of his employees. However, his wife and daughter planned a trip to their summer home for the weekend and he can’t go because of all this work. But he bumps into Winnie the Pooh and eventually realizes all the fun he’s been missing out on with his family. It’s your typical, cliché story about learning to revisit your childhood as an adult, but one scene caught my focus in particular.
After Christopher comes home from work late, missing dinner yet again, he tries to console Evelyn by telling her that this can’t be helped and that if he continues to work hard at this job, their lives will be better in the future. However, Evelyn reminds him that his life is happening right now and that she and Madeline miss him.
It’s a small scene, but boy did it make me reflect on my own life and ask the essential question:
Am I actually enjoying my life right now?
As we get older, and especially while in college, our lives start becoming consumed with working towards something. We do homework to prepare for a test, to pass a class, then get a degree, then get a job, to make money, to buy a house, and live comfortably. Everything we do and all the choices we make are for the betterment of our future selves, yet we stop so little to look at where we are now. And that is unhealthy.
While it’s good to be ambitious and on top of everything, we have to understand why we are ambitious. The whole point of it all is to live a happy life, right? Like I said before, everything we do is working towards something that will eventually bring us joy. But why not have that joy now?
Happiness doesn’t stop when you leave childhood, neither does it have to happen once you’ve accomplished everything. Instead, we must understand that happiness becomes more difficult as we get older because with adulthood comes unwanted responsibility. But no matter how difficult it may be, we must prioritize individual happiness even more than we do school, work, or anything else. Because even though school and work are important to make a living, happiness is important for actually, truly living.
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