100 Days of Wonder – #22

Ah Pluto! The first time I went to Disney World it took me a minute to suspend reality enough to do the whole character thing. Now I look forward to the silliness of the interaction. But silliness isn’t really what this post is about. The first time I went, characters like Pluto and even Mickey Mouse didn’t really mean anything to me. I didn’t watch cartoons as a kid, not that I remember anyway and I definitely couldn’t have told you the difference between Goofy and Pluto or Chip and Dale and Donald Duck has nephews? Anyway, over the last 20 years I have watched a lot of the old shorts as well as Disney Classics like Snow White (but not Bambi, I saw Bambi at the cinema when I was little and I’m still traumatised) and somehow that has set everything else Disney in context. I didn’t know I wanted or needed context but knowing the old stuff has made me enjoy the new(er) stuff more. It has also made me think about going back to the foundations or basics in so many things: Running, yoga, work. Knowing and understanding the foundations means we can build from them, we can critique and challenge them and we can learn from them. Sometimes we need to go back to the foundations or starting points to correct our course or to go on a new adventure. Maybe the Disney classics, the seminal works in any given discipline, the Couch to 5k programme or simple sun salutations are a different kind of base camp to the one made up of the familiar that I mentioned before, but one that is just as important. (And in case you are wondering, Chip has a black nose and Dale has a red nose)