"Grow Up to Be a Wizard: Peter Pan and the Myth of Adulthood"
When I was ten years old, I told a bitter old scholar that I never wanted to grow up.
He looked at me, dead in the eye, and said, "Then die now."
He was my tutor while I was living with my grandfather in Ireland. He was an old soldier, an Oxford man, and had known J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis well enough to keep their letters tucked away in his desk like relics. After telling a ten-year-old to drop dead, he finally explained himself.
He said, "That is the closest man gets to immortality. But remember this: children are powerless. They can do almost nothing on their own. Only a grown person has true power. We are wizards, making the impossible possible. But only in the hearts of children does magic live."
I think about that constantly, especially now. We have spent the last fifty years entirely demonizing the concept of growing up. We look around at modern media, and adulthood is exclusively framed as a trap. The men are sad buffoons, the women are exhausted geniuses, and the cultural battle cry is a relentless, exhausting chorus of, "Adulting is hard."
We are a society obsessed with Peter Pan. We are terrified of becoming Mr. Darling or Captain Hook, desperately clinging to the idea that growing up inherently means losing our magic.
But my tutor was right. Adulthood isn't a curse. It is a tool.
Think of the people who actually lived this way. The adults who used their power to build magic. Two dreamers in Ohio building a machine to literally touch the sky. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby giving a fractured world modern mythology. Hayao Miyazaki bringing paper to life in ways no one else ever could, and Jim Henson crafting entire, breathing universes out of felt and foam.
Growing up is the forge.
So rather than whine about growing old, make sure the child you were lives long enough in your heart to help the adult you become make the impossible real.
Grow up, traveler. But grow up to be a wizard. Stay bloodthirsty.
