Finding Your Neverland

While listening to the beautiful soundtrack of Finding Neverland, I realized a few things about how people live without magic in their life.

When we were children, our parents, the society encourage us to believe in magic, to develop our imagination: they make up stories, they read us fairy tales about fairies, princesses and princes, witches and wizards.

But when we’re getting older and we become an adult, they tell us to forget about everything our imagination created. We are told to stop believing in magic, in fairies because it’s not REAL because it’s a waste of time. Because we have to face the REAL world and be able to live in and survive in it. Because this world is cruel and cold.

BUT I think that if we stop believing, this world will crush us. It’s a cruel and harsh world and if “our feet are always on the ground”, we’re not going to be able to live in it peacefully, we’ll be at the mercy of the cruelty of this world and sometimes, it’ll be able to lead us to the worst (suicide, mental illness, despair, sadness, boredom, unhappiness, self-loathing); we’ll barely be able to survive in it.

So we need a little help. And this help comes with magic and our imagination. Thus, I think that everyone needs to believe, everyone needs to have a moment in the clouds, in their own Neverland, which can be everything, everywhere you want it to, everything that makes you feel better (it can be our faith, it can be a place, a person, a hobby) and somewhere where they can be a child again and where nothing will hurt them, where they can leave the world behind. That’s why we have TV shows, movies, theatres, musicals, music (...) to keep people believing and to spread the magic, to make people dream for one night, for one moment.

We need to BELIEVE. But we also need to remember to get down on solid earth, otherwise, we’ll lose the sense of reality and it can be as dangerous as staying firmly on the ground.

I just think that we need to believe in magic, in inexplicable things, we need to let a little bit of fantasy in our life.

Like JM Barrie says in “When Your Feet Don’t Touch The Ground”: “here it’s safe/In this place/Above the clouds” and “you can’t feel the things that hurt/And you’re free”; we all need a place where we can feel safe and protected, where nothing will harm us; and that’s what these songs made me realize.

It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not because as long as you believe in it, it will be true (“Make believe and you will find out that it’s true”).

We still need to believe in magic and in fairy tales: you’ll see the world differently and you’ll be able to live happily, or at least, peacefully. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; what matters, is that you BELIEVE.

I think we all need to be more like JM Barrie, a believer, a dreamer; someone who will bring magic in one’s life!

Finding Neverland on Broadway (photo: Carol Rosegg)