Tuck Everlasting, a children’s classic by Natalie Babbitt written almost 35 years ago and adapted twice for the screen, is a fantastic tale of 10-year-old Winnie Foster who becomes friends with a family of immortals, the Tucks. Through their eyes and experience, she grows to understand that living forever is not all it is imagined to be.
Jessie Tuck is frozen in time at age 17. He will never become a man. The richness of maturity is denied him after he drinks from a clear spring in a secluded wood, unaware that this sip will seal his fate. His brother Miles has remained ever a young man, while his wife and children have grown noticeably older. Eventually they leave him, unable to adjust to this bizarre reality. Best to let them be. Best to live a secluded life, he reasons, even though his heart aches to be with them. Their parents, Mae and Angus, stay permanently middle aged, with nothing different to look forward to – witnesses from a distance to change without being a part of its natural ebb and flow.
There is a comfort in knowing things will change, even though we might at first wish them to last forever. A comfort and a vitality in movement through the cycles, large and small, for the anticipated and familiar is always colored with uniqueness. We see this each day in the sunrise and sunset (no two are the same) and in the seasons of the year. This repeated message of constancy in change deepens our awareness of ourselves and our world. Responding to this uniqueness, as a child would an unexpected surprise, promises perennial renewal.
In the I Ching, Chinese Book of Changes, we read:
Continuity in change. The secret of the eternity of the universe.
Angus explains it to Winnie like this:
Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is … being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing.
