Peter Pan has been read by children and by adults for well over a century now without losing any of its power.
The children love it for its pirates and its fairies and its flying and its magical impossible island.
The adults love it for something harder to name — a quality of ache and recognition that children do not feel yet.
Adults recognize in Peter the thing they have lost or are in the process of losing or are trying hard to hold onto.
They recognize in Wendy the choice they made or the choice they are still deciding whether to make or not.
The story endures because it asks a question that every human being eventually has to answer for themselves.
What do you keep and what do you let go, and how do you live well with whichever choice you make in the end?
Peter Pan shows us that imagination keeps us young no matter how old we get.

The reason Peter Pan has survived for more than a century as a living story rather than a historical artifact is precise.
It addresses a question that every generation faces in its own way but that no generation fully resolves or moves past.
The question is about what is lost in the transition from childhood to adulthood and whether any of it can be recovered.
Barrie's answer is nuanced in ways that a simple reading of the story tends to obscure or flatten into something easier.
He does not say that growing up is wrong or that Peter's choice is the right one for people who value human connection.
He does not say that Wendy's choice is the right one either, or that imagination is automatically preserved by it.
What he says is that imagination — the capacity for genuine wonder and creative engagement with the world — is a choice.
It can be chosen at any age and sustained across a lifetime if a person is willing to keep making that choice deliberately.
Peter Pan shows us that imagination keeps us young no matter how old we get.