I am sure everyone can remember their favorite childhood book or series. They can remember the excitement when they flipped through the endless pages, engrossed in the tale it told. Perhaps there was time travel, box cars, unfortunate events, wizards and witches, princesses, wardrobes, and more. No matter the story, it stuck with us.

To this day, at the very least, a small portion remains in our hearts. It's hard to forget something that left an impact on your life, or at least it is for me. To this day, I can’t wait to get a new novel, a new story, a new world to dive headfirst into. It’s breathtaking, it's unique, it’s the power of literature.

When you were a little kid, a different world seemed so fascinating. You wanted to go on adventures there, you wanted to explore every nook and cranny, you just wanted to live there. Even now, this remains the same, again at least for me. I find myself drawn to these places ten years later for many of the same reasons.

With the threat of impending adulthood and “real life”, the pull to immerse myself in a book grows stronger. I want to live in a world where I’m a queen of Narnia. I want to live in a world where I can go to a school for magic. I want to live in a world where I don’t have to worry about taxes and exams, but where I can instead travel through time in an endless adventure. The inner child in all of us does not lose the desire to escape this world, instead it's amplified. Because now, in this day and age, with all the stress of school, work, and relationships; many will find that in the deepest desires of our hearts we just want to escape for a little while. That’s what literature does for us. It lets us live there for a short while, it lets us explore from the safety of our minds and hearts. Because even if we close the pages, the story is still right there at the forefront of our minds.

Looking back at the stories, we can learn different things from them that we might not have fully understood as children. We begin to understand the weight of responsibility like Harry Potter does. We begin to learn the importance of family like Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund do. We begin to see the timeless lessons scattered throughout these childhood favorites. Lessons we thought we’d grown too old to appreciate.

So while we may grow older, the stories remain the same. It's what you take away from the story at a certain point in your life that really leaves the impact. Those characters have been with you for ages, and now they get to teach you something new. Not only that, but now you have the chance to explore an even wider variety of stories with new themes and lessons. You get to explore more worlds and get lost in them. As you grow older, literature will always be there for you to escape to, no matter your age.