Our Personal Neverlands

The picture to the right is a mere snippet of the grandeur Michael Jackson's Neverland once possessed. Erected to mirror the realm Peter Pan and his buddies found refuge in from a world leading them on the dreadful path to adulthood, the late Michael Jackson in a way let himself succumb to the seductive allure of the miniature theme park and what it stood for. In reality, his erection of such a fantastical abode epitomized his inability to cope with growing up--both physically and mentally, spiritually and emotionally. I feel as if there is a little Michael Jackson in us all that wants to hold on to the grandeur those awkward, puss-filled pimple years of our adolescents, in retrospect, possess in our eyes as we stand on the border between teenage years and adulthood. In contemporary society, this unwillingness to take that leap into adulthood has been dubbed as nostalgia. The fact of the matter is that we need to plunge into adulthood in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle, image, and relationship with society; stutter stepping into adulthood could prove to be detrimental to our development as a society on a whole in the years to come.