"A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. Never leave that till tomorrow, he said, which you can do today. This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don't know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I'd have to say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes the fear is just of making a decision, because what if you're wrong? What if you're making a mistake you can't undo? The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can't pretend we hadn't been told. We've all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today's possibility under tomorrow's rug until we can't anymore. Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin really meant. That knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure, even the worst, beat the hell out of never trying."
I fell in love with Tuck Everlasting many summers ago. It's a beautiful, bittersweet story of love, immortality and perhaps, the meaning of life: our purpose, and what we are really living for. The words 'escapism' and 'films' are intrinsically interlinked, no matter how much we deny it. In the end, the truth is, we all love to be momentarily lost for an hour and a half in a world so removed from reality that it can't be real, not even movie-real, yet everything feels so close that you can almost feel the tall, tall grass quickly brush across your legs as you run daringly through a field on a hot day during the peak of summer. When it all ends, and as you leave the air of anticipation, of magic, and the limitless possibilities swirling in the dark, dark cinema theatre, sometimes, just sometimes, you also leave with wonderful thoughts and lessons and realisations that are real. Now, that's magical.
Tuck said it to Winnie the summer she turned fifteen: do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever...you just have to live. (And she did.)