A game of pooh sticks

I am absolutely certain that at some point in your life you have stood on a bridge, dropped a stick over the edge and run to the other side to see whose stick arrives from under the bridge first. If you haven’t you really should.

So why pooh sticks this morning? What is a children’s game telling me? The first message is quite simple and that is be a child sometimes and stop taking the world so seriously. I think we can all become guilty of that. We can have periods in our life where we forget to have fun in what we do, take it seriously and lose the magic and the joy.

The second message I guess is something around trust, anticipation and faith. When you drop that stick over the edge you don’t know where it’s going to end up or even if it will get snagged on a rock and ever come out the other side but you trust the flow of the river will carry it through. The anticipation, especially if this is a game of more than one stick and a competition is taking place, can be immense to see if you are the winner. You will genuinely believe your stick is best, fastest, the winner. You will have faith that nothing will stop it, the river will flow and no debris will cause it to stop. You have faith that after letting go it will come out the other side first.

Finally there is remembering the stick you put in and can recognise it when it comes out. For pooh sticks we pick random sticks to throw over and even though you may have only had this in your hand for just a minute you are absolutely sure you will recognise it on the other side. 

When we play pooh sticks in life and we decide what we are willing to let go into a force far greater than ourselves; we are putting our faith, our belief into a process we have no control over, we don’t know what obstacles there will be, they will be out of sight and maybe under the surface and undetectable. We have a marvellous sense of anticipation watching something that is ours travel along, sometimes at speed, sometimes meandering and reaching a destination. We get carried along with the game, the competition, the laughter as we wait, sometimes seconds, sometimes longer for the results to appear. Most of all we have fun and that is the bit we usually forget.

Anyone want a game of pooh sticks?