The Unlived Life

“For some time passes slowly. An hour can seem an eternity. For others, there’s never enough"


One of my favorite books when I was younger was Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. I loved the woodland setting of Treegap: the oak trees and shady brooks and open-air grottoes and wildlife scurrying about the forest floor...and Winnie. I loved Winnie. I was young, and she was the picture of innocence, femininity, life and change. I wanted to be Winnie Foster, who ran barefoot through fields of lilies and wildflowers in a billowy white dress and ribboned straw hat. I was Winnie Foster when I read the book, falling in love with Jesse and struggling with the choice between a natural life and and eternal life.


What's more, though, is how the book affected my outlook on life. One of my favorite quotes in the entire book occurs when Old Tuck paddles down the river with Winnie and talks about the choice between death and immortality.


"Look around you, it’s life. The flowers, and trees, and frogs, it’s all part of the wheel. It’s always changing. It’s always growing. Like you, Winnie, your life is never the same. You were once a child, now you are about to become a woman. One day you’ll grow up. You’ll do something important. You’ll have children maybe, and then one day you’ll go out. Just like the flame of a candle. You’ll make way for new life as a certainty. It’s the natural way of things. And then, there’s us. What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just are. We’re like rocks stuck at the side of the stream."
 "I don’t wanna die, is that wrong?"
He shook his head.
 "No human does, but it’s just part of the wheel, it’s part of being born, you can’t have living, without dying. Don’t be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life.”




We are blessed to die and make room for new life; to grow old, to change and grow and develop. We are blessed to die, because it means we lived. What short time we get on this earth is a gift, we can pass through this world and maybe, just maybe, leave something tangible, meaningful in the river as we go out.


To this day I read the book every couple of summers, beginning as school ends and making Winnie's journey through time, living as she lived, if only for a moment in the stream of life.

"Tuck said it to Winnie the summer she turned 15, ‘Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live. And she did."
-M
 
P.S. For a much more eloquently expressed interpretation of these thoughts, I encourage you to go pick up the book: Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.