Forever young? Well isn’t that a recurring theme in our culture – This notion that you can somehow freeze time forever, remaining in an endless loop of non-responsibility for anything outside your own imaginary worlds. There is this need to idolize youth as an ultimate value and the most desired commodity of them all. In the practical reverberation of this you’ll see women spending absurd amounts of money within the global economy in order to buy youth through cosmetics as it can be traded somehow, and the men wearing “Pow” “Kablam ” and “Zap” T-shirts well into their 40s to keep their boyish charm.

The Peter Pan story is a perfect echo of this eternal quest starting in alchemy searching for a way to live forever. A hero to children all over the world, Peter Pan is actually not that much a hero, not even an antihero, more of a warning. There is a reason why his magical dwelling of Neverland is an unreachable nonlocality – “fly to the second star on the right, and straight on till morning” – because it is not real. The place where you are allowed to never ever (hence the name) grow up does not exist. The lost boys aren’t only “lost” in space, far away from home geographically – the directions are right there, you just need to reverse them to go back home – but they are generally lost emotionally, led by an equally lost preadolescent who has no real goal or future plan that to just fight the only form of authority he knows and therefore has to rebel against – Captain Hook. But Hook is a cruel bitter tyrant, a grown up who realized something – that the passage of time will eventually start to take pieces of you – that’s why the crocodile has a clock in his tummy, and why Hook is terrified when he hears ticking. He’s not trying to keep the crocodile away by banning clocks, but the inevitability of life – death.

Peter Pan is no hero, he’s lost in every sense of the world, escaping into imaginary happy thoughts in order to fly… to go nowhere. He is unable to make any connection to a real person but only to fantasies -Tinkerbell. Forever young is a sad myth, and a harmful one. As you grow up some things will have to be substituted within you, but it’s quite possible to hold on to the most beautiful aspects of childhood – curiosity, wonder, playfulness, lack of fear and opened vulnerability – no matter what happens while you’re growing up. Staying a child forever won’t shelter you from all that is to come, but it will make you not see any real solutions. Grow up but keep the kid inside alive and well!