Lurking in the Shadows by Nikhil Sharda

When I was four years old, I would climb into bed next to my mom each night, listening intently while she made her way through a few pages of “Peter Pan”. With an Anglo accent I didn’t yet know she had and mispronunciations I didn’t yet know were funny, she’d read slowly, running her finger underneath each word as she went.

I both cherished and despised this nightly ritual. While the books were marvellous—all fluttering bonnets and rugged adventures—I was perplexed by the ease with which my mom turned those strings of letters into beautiful words and sentences. How does she know what they say? It was the most infuriating thing in my little life.

Later, now, this insatiable curiosity—the desire to be in on the joke, to see the answer, to have all the pieces to the puzzle—remains one of my guiding principles. It’s what turned me from a discontented writer into an editor, from a doer into a questioner. It’s likely that you’re familiar with this as well. Whether you are an editor, a publisher, writer, strategist, or, most importantly, a reader, odds are that curiosity—the desire to know all the things—propelled you to where you are today.

Yet curiosity is tricky. It’s the first thing that pushes us forward, but it’s also one of the first to hold us back: to keep us from shipping good ideas because we’re too busy lusting after unachievable ones. If we want curiosity to take us further, this first principle demands a second look.

Of particular interest is Peter’s shadow which somehow manages to “fall off” now and then. The notion of a free shadow, detached from its source object, is rather peculiar. In order to explain its purpose in context, themes of courage and fear, fantasy and reality, happiness and sadness, strength and weakness, and past and future must be kept in mind. A possible symbol of each of these elements, Peter Pan’s extraordinary shadow sheds light on childhood and the process of growing up.