Hi Friends! I hope you all are doing well. I can't believe we are a week+ into November as I write this post. The years go by really fast (it seems that this only happens when things are going well in my life) or they pass by exceedingly slow (when shit is hitting the fan!). What about you? Do your years crawl by, or do you feel like you blink and it's already Thanksgiving?
Today, we're continuing our Lessons from Literature series. Last time, we focused on the book "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. Presently, we are focused on the book "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbitt. The novel focuses on a young girl, Winnie, who meets a peculiar family in the woods, The Tucks. She becomes enamored with Jesse Tuck, the seventeen year old boy, who the readers come to find out, is actually 104 years old. Jesse and his family drank from a mysterious spring of water 104 years ago, and have lived frozen in time ever since. They don't age. They can't die. They're immortal. The rest of the novel moves at a brisk pace, with Jesse giving Winnie a bottle of the spring water and asking her to drink when she turns 17, so they can be together forever. No spoiler alerts here, but I do urge you to go read this book, if you get the chance. It's absolutely lovely and heartbreaking and deep. Below are two of my favorite quotes from the novel:
"What we have, us Tucks, it's not living. We just are. Like rocks on the side of a mountain."
"Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of unlived life, you don't have to live forever, you just have to live!"
What's the lesson here? I think the main question is "Could you live forever?" And my follow up question, "If you could live forever, what would you change about your current life? Could you live forever living with everything in your life exactly as it is?"
For me, I wouldn't choose immortality. The idea of outliving the people I love sounds devastating. Imagine living forever and never seeing the world in any different lights or perspectives, because you know that you'll see it again, tomorrow and every day after that. Isn't half the beauty in the world captivating because it's finite? For example, have you ever looked at the face of a newborn baby and then followed them into toddlerhood and beyond? Part of why people reminisce about the 'newborn days' is because they have an end to them, which makes them precious.
It is an interesting thought, though, about what you would change if you were to become immortal. Would you continue to work? (Maybe not in the same way you do now.) Would you stay with the same partner? (Would marriages last if people knew they had to make it work forever? Till Death Do Us Part sounds like a looonngggg time already-- what if 'death' never came? What then?) Would you pursue something like a degree or the arts, because you know you have all the time in the universe to do so? Would you adventure more? Travel more? Enjoy food, music, dance, art more?
Perhaps the message we can learn from Tuck Everlasting is that you don't need eternity to make necessary changes in your life to live the rest of it meaningfully. Maybe we don't require immortal life in order to live full existences. Maybe all we need is an appreciation for the now.
And, if you're curious about what living life meaningfully would look like for you, give me a shout via email at info@giftofgritcounseling.com, or schedule a consultation call with me here.
Take Exquisite Care of Yourself,
Megan
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