64 Pine Street. Yonkers NY. Alone in an upstairs bedroom. I laid out sheets of white poster board I used for drawings, and grabbed a pen. Then found tiny screwdrivers. I think they were for repairing glasses. The memory is so clear.
I was maybe nine or ten when I took apart my brother's watch. Not because it was broken or because I thought I could fix it.
I removed every piece carefully, methodically, and labeled each one. A gear. A spring. A tiny jeweled pivot I had no name for but labeled anyway. When I was done, the watch was in 'perfect' order, even with categories to the pieces. The pieces I couldn't take apart I kind of forced apart.
By the end, it was definitely longer a watch.
I got in considerable trouble for that.
What I remember most isn't the punishment. It's the feeling before it. A complete, consuming need to know. I just had to see. No agenda. No plan. Just the pure, uncomplicated question: what is this made of, and how does it work?
I have been asking that question my entire life. About stories. About faith. About what people are made of when everything is stripped away. About what survives when the world tries to make you forget.
Those questions eventually became a world. A series of novels. A card game. An audiobook. A growing creative ecosystem built from the margins of notebooks and the 3am hours when the questions wouldn't let me sleep.
But none of it started with ambition. It started with a child who couldn't leave a watch alone.
There are people I have idolized my entire life. Not for their fame or their wealth, though those came. For something more specific.
George Lucas built a universe with its own history, its own mythology, its own internal logic that existed long before anyone asked for it. Tolkien invented languages. Entire genealogies. A cosmology so complete it had its own creation myth, its own music of the spheres. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby built a world where the rules of one story affected the rules of every other story. A living, breathing system that decades of writers are still exploring. Todd McFarlane gave Spawn a theology. Richard and Wendy Pini gave ElfQuest an evolutionary history rooted in something genuinely alien and genuinely tender at the same time. Kevin Feige understood before almost anyone else that the connective tissue between stories was itself a story.
What do they share?
Not just imagination. Lots of people have imagination. They share a child who was never fully put away. The child who asks what if without waiting for permission. Who builds the thing that wasn't asked for because the need to build it is stronger than the need for it to make sense yet. Who labels the pieces of a watch not because there is a plan, but because curiosity and trying to understand or even just see, is the point.
That child is still in all of them. You can feel it in the work. The excess of it. The detail nobody required. The love poured into corners no one may ever see. That is not the work of a professional calculating an audience. That is the work of someone who can't help themselves. Someone still kneeling on the floor with the pieces spread out, genuinely delighted, genuinely consumed, and even a bit scared.
Somewhere along the way, most of us received a version of the same message.
Put away childish things.
It arrives in different forms. Sometimes it is spoken directly, with the best intentions, by people who love us and want us to be practical. Sometimes it arrives as silence. A kind of slow withering of encouragement as years pass and the questions begin to seem less charming and more inconvenient. Sometimes we deliver it to ourselves, in the voice of reason, in the name of responsibility, in the quiet surrender of a creative life to the demands of a practical one.
I understand that message. I lived by it for years. The questions went underground. The world I had been building in the margins got tabled. Life filled in the space, as life does, with love, family, work, the beautiful weight of 'growing up'. But the child did not leave, it just child waited.
At 3am, when the house was quiet and something I couldn't name pulled me back to the desk, the child was there. Still asking. Still needing to know what was inside. Still labeling pieces with no certainty about what came next, only certainty that the knowing mattered.
My wife Anne saw it before I did. She stepped back not because she had lost interest, but because she recognized something in what I was doing that I had not yet named. She told me there was an author in me. That the questions were finding their way to the surface. That I should run with it and see where it led.
She was right. She usually is.
What emerged was the Durajan. A world built from questions about faith, memory, identity, and what survives when everything else is taken. A story told through the voices of the banished, the forgotten, the ones the world tried to erase. A world where remembrance is resistance and the refusal to be forgotten is its own form of defiance.
The child led me there. The child who never stopped asking.
I want to say something that might sound strange at first.
I think the child inside us is not just who we were. I think the child is who we most essentially are. It's who existed before the world began its work of shaping us into something more manageable. Before we learned to perform competence. Before we understood that certain questions were impractical and certain dreams were indulgent and certain ways of engaging with the world were, by common consensus, childish.
The child knew things we have since been talked out of. The child knew that a broken watch was more interesting open than closed. That the question matters more than the answer. That building a world for the love of building it is not a waste of time. It is perhaps the most honest use of time there is.
In many traditions, the ancestors are not simply the dead. They are the keepers of what endures. The memory beneath the memory. The voice that speaks when the noise of the present finally quiets.
I think the child is that voice. Not as nostalgia or escape, but as navigation. As the truest compass we have, pointing not toward what we should want, but toward what we have always, beneath everything, actually wanted.
The world is very good at drowning that voice out. It has tools: practicality, comparison, the steady low hum of other people's expectations. It will tell you that your questions are too big or too small, too personal or too strange, too late or too early or simply too much.
The child does not believe any of that.
The child is still on the floor with the pieces spread out, still genuinely delighted, still completely certain that the knowing is worth the trouble.
If you are reading this and something in you recognized the Timex. If you have your own version of that watch, your own labeled pieces, your own questions that never fully went away, I am writing this for you.
Listen to the child.
Not in spite of your responsibilities. Not by abandoning what you have built. But alongside it, beneath it, woven into it. Let the child ask the questions your adult self has learned to suppress. Let the child lead you somewhere impractical and consuming and entirely yours.
You do not have to put the watch back together.
You were never supposed to.
You were supposed to see and try to understand what was inside. And then, if the child in you has anything to say about it, build something new from what you found there.
That is not childish.
That is the most human thing there is.
