Humanity is just like any human, only much more so. It crawled out of the Cradle of Civilization, then—stooped, drooling, and grunting—began to finger-paint on the walls of caves (sort of the prehistoric family refrigerator); got busy with its LEGOs in the Bronze and Iron ages; locked itself in its room for a preteen sulk during the Dark Ages; had a Middle Ages crisis before getting its groove back in the Renaissance; grew curiouser and curiouser in the Age of Discovery; ignored Mother Earth’s plea to “Go play outside! It’s lovely!” in the Industrial Age; gained knowledge in the twentieth century, before running out of ideas altogether in the early twenty-first century: the age of mere fine-tuning, making gadgets finger-foilingly small, or simply adding a lower-case “i” in front of everything.…

And if humanity has any interest in remaining human, then it is high time for a little time off. All work and no play makes Jack a dull proverb. We need time to play in the sandbox (not the cat box, mind you: that’s where pinworms play) to reconnect with what it really means to be human. Progress is all fine and good, yet now that the world has officially been declared round, all of this flying forward will one day have us catching up with ourselves, risking one doozy of a rear-end collision.

Childhood helps put the vivid “hue” in human … the “kind” in humankind. Childhood is a time before toy soldiers become real soldiers and broken dollies suffer from crippling esteem issues. It’s a no-backs-touching-black safety zone that allows imagination to blossom, endowing humanity with the rare ability to creatively problem-solve. Without this ability, life is like fishing for eighty-something years only to find out that it wasn’t fish you were really after, after all.

Speaking of after, even in the afterlife there are those who feel far too grown up to leave things to the greasy kids’ stuff of chance and faith. These addled post-adults are under the delusion that existence is about power. About control. About maturity at any price.

But in the rarefied realms of eternity, everything is about to be turned on its otherworldy head. And it’s not about power. It’s not about control.

It’s about time.

And humanity may well be caught between the cradle and a grave situation indeed.…