John Darling immediately began trying to calculate the physics of flight when Peter explained how it worked.
He thought about angles and velocities and the precise ratio of fairy dust to body weight required.
But the more carefully he thought about the science of the thing, the more firmly his feet stayed down.
Peter watched him with patient amusement and eventually reached over and tapped him lightly on the forehead.
He told John to stop analyzing and start remembering — the happiest morning, the best day, the thing he loved most.
John closed his eyes and thought of Christmas breakfast and the smell of his mother's perfume and rose three feet.
The secret of flight had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with what the mind chose to hold.
Happy thoughts help you fly.

The instruction Peter gives the Darling children about flying contains a surprisingly sophisticated idea inside it.
He does not tell them to try harder or to believe more intensely or to wish with greater concentration and effort.
He tells them to think of something happy — which is to say, to shift the content of their minds entirely.
This works because flight in Barrie's world is not a physical achievement but an emotional and imaginative one.
The barrier between standing on the floor and rising into the air is not muscular but psychological and internal.
It is the weight of worry, responsibility, and ordinary adult seriousness that keeps most people permanently grounded.
A genuinely happy thought — one that returns a person to their most alive and most unguarded self — dissolves that weight.
The ability to fly, Barrie suggests, is something all of us possess and most of us quietly talk ourselves out of.
Happy thoughts help you fly.