The most remarkable thing about Peter Pan was not that he could fly or fight or crow magnificently.
It was that he woke up every single morning as curious and as delighted by the world as he had been the day before.
Most people, as they accumulate experience, find that fewer and fewer things genuinely surprise or move them.
But Peter approached each new day as if it might contain something he had never encountered or imagined before.
This quality — the refusal to let experience become routine — was what the fairy dust was really made of.
The lost boys could grow old because they had stopped asking what might happen next with genuine excitement and wonder.
Peter could not grow old because he had never stopped asking that question and never intended to stop asking it ever.
Imagination keeps us young.

Peter Pan's permanent youth is usually understood as a fantasy — a wish-fulfillment story about escaping the inevitable.
But Barrie's treatment of it suggests something more interesting and more available than simple biological impossibility.
The aging that matters most in the story is not physical but imaginative — the gradual dimming of curiosity and wonder.
Characters grow old in Barrie's world not when their hair turns grey but when they stop being genuinely surprised by things.
Peter's immortality is the immortality of a mind that has never agreed to find the world ordinary and predictable.
This form of youth is not available to everyone — it requires a sustained and deliberate refusal to settle into routine.
But Barrie suggests it is available to some people across the full span of their lives if they choose it consistently.
The imagination that keeps Peter Pan young is the same imagination available to anyone willing to keep exercising it.
Imagination keeps us young.