At the Top of a Very Tall Building

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Fred worked at the top of a very tall building. He arrived one day, took the elevator to the top, and sat down at his desk. It was a few minutes before he noticed that there was a dead corpse lying on the desk beside the computer. As in, a dead human. Fred eyed it with a mix of nausea and morbid fascination.

He stood up and looked in to the cubicle next door, where a woman named Gloria worked. "Gloria?" said Chuck.

"What?" she said.

"I've got a dead body on my desk."

"Oh yeah, I do too," she replied, "I think everyone on this floor does. New company policy."

Fred shrugged and sat back down. He looked in an envelope that contained his assignment for the day. The paper said: Please dismantle your computer, then put it back together again. Fred got to work, though he had no idea why he was supposed to do this. He liked it better than the previous day's assignment anyway (please carry your computer up and down the stairs 878 times).

But when he was about halfway through the process, he suddenly stopped. He looked from the dismantled electrical instrument to the dead body on the desk.

"Is this what it means to be an adult in the working world?" he asked himself, "Does it mean working endlessly at completely meaningless tasks while the stench of death fills your office?"

He stood up and grabbed the megaphone that was (for some reason) lying under his desk. He turned it on and yelled to his coworkers: "Hey, guys, stop working for a second and think about this. Remember what it was like to be a kid? Such purity. The emotions ran freely back then, nothing was suppressed or corrupted by maturity or illicit substances. Childhood was such a whirlwind of emotions. Uuuuuh....yeah. I can't really get across what I'm trying to say. I just mean that...what if childhood was the best life gets? Wouldn't that be painfully, depressingly ironic if the best years of our lives just slipped by without us noticing? But what if the emotional innocence of childhood could be recaptured? Let's go play on a playground. Let's cast aside the boundaries and roadblocks of adulthood, take off these cumbersome business suits, forget the continual loneliness and anxiety that came when we hit adolescence, and go play on a playground. We can climb the jungle gym, we can see-saw, we could even play in the sandbox! And I could really go for a game of cops-and-robbers or freeze tag or even hopscotch right now. We'd show ourselves that our childhood selves are still lurking inside us somewhere, just waiting to be unleashed."

His coworkers shrugged and continued working.

Chuck, however, stood up and said "See you!" to the dead carcass on his desk. He ran from the room, casting off his business suit as he went. He went to a nearby store and bought some children's clothes (spongebob underpants and a batman t-shirt). Then he ran to a nearby playground and started swinging on the swings, singing tunelessly.

From that day on, he'd go to the playground and play there all day. He'd frolick in the sandbox, climb around on the monkey bars, and challenge little kids to games of tag. Kids mostly laughed at him and called him silly and stupid. Parents mostly assumed he was some sort of sexual deviant, and stopped taking their kids to the playground. Eventually, nobody came to the playground anymore except Chuck, the lone adult child, who spent his days chasing bugs around, sliding down the slide, and climbing the jungle gym.

His coworkers could see Chuck from the top of their tall building. Each of them held their dead bodies tight as they watched.

"Pathetic, isn't it?" they said to each other, while deep inside, they all wished they could be out there with him.

IS childhood the best thing that happens to us in life?

DOES growing up mean spending your time in an office cubicle, trying to ignore the stench of decay?

Or does growing up mean realizing how awesome childhood was?

OR does growing up mean being able to look back on childhood, but being wise enough to not try to recapture it?

Who were the real adults in that story? Who were the real kids?

What did the dead bodies smell like?

...anyway, I suppose what I'm really trying to get at here is this. If you're driving down a road, with a suitcase at your side, and you pass a playground and get an urge to stop and play for a few minutes, don't ignore the urge. It's only a few minutes. You're not too old. You're not too grown-up. You're a human being. So play a little.