Meet Peter, My Hero.

I have had one tune lately, and it is wearing on me. The fact that my 21st birthday is in a little over a day seems so bizarre. It hardly registers with me because I have been so wrapped up in everything else. Life kept going? Really?

I've been watching the first season of Heroes lately, and I've found that the power I would most want for myself is that of Hiro Nakamura: the power to bend time and space. I'm sure you've discussed with your friends what superpower you would want if you were a superhero. My answer was usually the ability to go back in time so I could live within the ancient societies I have studied so extensively, or so I could freeze time to take a nap. My answer is still the same, but I have different reasons. Now, I just want time to re-experience my life. I wouldn't change anything--I just want more vivid access to my memories, and more time to appreciate all that is happening around me.

I am almost 21 years old. How did that happen? I remember envying the time when I would be 13, a teenager at last! Anthony Hopkins says in Meet Joe Black, "Sixty-five years. Don't they go by in a blink?" The first time I watched that movie, I carelessly attributed his statement to the sentimentality of an old man. Though I am nowhere near 65, I can begin to appreciate what he was saying. College went by in a blink, high school went even faster. Hell, what happened to childhood altogether? At what point did I stop being a child?

There are many answers to those questions, and I will not be so naive as to assume adulthood came upon me in one swift moment. I can only rely on my distaste for Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers to assure me that I have acquired some level of maturity since I was 15. It is assuring to know that there can be no particular instance that bestows adulthood upon us--we have to earn it, step by step, decision by decision until one day we realize that we have stopped shopping in the juniors section for quite some time now.

My blog is replete with literary allusions, so what's one more? As the boy who would not grow up, Peter Pan always somewhat scared me. Who would not want to grow up? As a child, I had a rosy image of adults, that they were somehow fully equipped with all the answers and confidence they would ever need. Moreover, I thought everyone had equal access to these necessities. I became confused and scared when I encountered adults who did not have answers for me, or who seemed unhappy with their lives. As I grew slightly older, I began to learn that circumstances shaped a person's confidence, education, and contentment with life. Moreover, the "necessities" that I thought everyone received in their adulthood gift basket were not necessities at all--some managed to exist without any answers or confidence in themselves and others. That was when Peter Pan began to make sense to me.

How badly do humans fear time and change that we consistently invent icons who live outside of such boundaries? I daresay there are several who would run from change if they could, gladly welcoming an earlier era when life was simpler and responsibilities were few. I myself would gleefully jump into Republican Rome or Classical Greece, only to become disenchanted when my simpler life consisted of making babies and running the household.

Not all change is bad, and not all change is change. There is something to be said for the inevitable passage of time when women can expect more out of life than domesticity. Of course, there are still those who chose to be housewives, but in our society it is more a choice than an imposed expectation. There is still a caste system in India, and slavery still oppresses more than half of Mauritania's population. I did not know these things when I was 5.

The passage of time can be cruel. It can produce embittered beings who feel misunderstood and mistreated by the world. The glare of the sun is bright when the rosy glasses come off. But how else can we see clearly? How else can we save the world?