The title of this essay is taken from a sign in a local toy shop. The store in question is called The Toy Box, a boutique shop, immaculate, spread over two floors, located in a ritzy part of downtown Toronto.

The last time I visited The Toy Box, I was greeted by a six-foot-tall moose, made completely of Lego, plucking away at a stand-up bass. Located a few steps past the front door, he was impossible to miss. Unfortunately, so was the sign affixed to his chest: "Please don't touch the Lego moose."

The sign was both harmless and harmful. Obviously, the engineers who spent dozens of hours putting together this antlered musician -- or it that moosician? -- would be frustrated to see their creation speckled with fingerprints, or worse, see bits of him go missing. But the tension between the goofy, welcoming moose and the admonishing adult sign was difficult to overlook. The moose generated wonder and awe at all the Lego bricks required to build him -- many more bricks than the average kid has ever owned. Then, abruptly, the sign dictated a hands-off policy for a hands-on toy.

This sign illustrates the struggle many creative professionals face in integrating their playful and serious sides. Conjuring up whimsy and magic and meeting deadlines are rarely congruent aims.

The moose, meanwhile, inspired me to browse the Lego offerings at The Toy Box, which served as a reminder that Lego is in a slow decline. A toy revered by many architects, graphic designers, photographers, programmers, illustrators, animators and writers, Lego, in the past ten years, maybe longer, has been changing -- for the worse. As our childhood toy of choice evaporates into a mess of movie and sport advertisements, is it any wonder those raised on little plastic bricks have so much trouble touching their inner Little One?

I make this claim as a huge fan of the toy. As a youngster, hour upon hour upon hour stacked up as I played with Legos, creating buildings, vehicles, and the necessary universes for them to exist within. When I visited London, England in 1998, I went to Windsor, and visited Legoland, instead of the famous castle.

But as the dominant symbol of creativity among my generation (I'm 29), Lego is starting to lose its imaginative "clutch power" -- the company's term for the "stick-to-itiveness" of the toy. In the novel Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, a character named Bug (a software programmer) rants about how things are no longer the way they once were:

"You know what really depresses the hell out of me? The way that kids nowadays don't have to use their imagination when they play with Lego. Say they buy a Lego car kit -- in the old days you'd open the box and out tumbled sixty pieces you had to assemble to make the car. Nowadays, you open the box and a whole car, pre-fucking-built, pops out -- the car itself is all one piece. Big woo. Some imagination-challenger that is. It's total cheating.

Legoland used to be a much simpler place, and we preferred it that way. It was not until 1961 that the wheel was invented in the Lego universe. In 1966, the first Lego train arrived. In the late 1970s, Lego introduced playsets with broad, generic themes such as City, Space and Castle; in 1989 a Pirate line was added. Lego evolved, but its creative potential remained constant, as the imaginative onus always rested on the child. Lego prided itself on providing a rigorous cognitive workout and "Just Imagine..." was an appropriate Lego slogan, given that six standard, eight-stud bricks can be joined in 102,981,500 different combinations.

Lately, however, those chunks of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene have been forced to compete with the flash and sizzle of the computer age. (Lego lost money for the first time in its history in 1998). There are now several Lego videogames and an official Lego website. In 1998, the MindStorms Robotics Invention System (US $199) was launched. (Geeks and other grownups drove initial sales of the toy, going so far as to hack RCX, the programming source code). In November of 2000, a Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Set, including a PC camera and editing software, appeared. Sadly, this increase in style has meant a decrease in creative impact.

Worse, Lego has begun co-branding with major global franchises like Harry Potter, Jurassic Park and Star Wars. These Lego series do not ask children to create a world from nothing -- instead, these kits employ narratives and sequences already established by the films they imitate. A child with Harry Potter Lego may re-enact scenes from the books or the movies, he or she might even create new scenarios for Harry, Hermione and Hagrid. But unlike, say, a box of plain eight-stud bricks, these sets come with a plot already included. The characters in these situations exist a priori, as do the backdrops. This is the Lego equivalent of colouring inside the lines; once considered anathema, now necessary for economic survival.

"Unlimited play possibilities," one of the ten basic values that Lego inventor Ole Kirk Christiansen first pledged in 1954, is no longer being upheld vigorously. The decision to offer movie and World Cup Soccer tie-ins means imagining occurs within circumscribed boundaries. The new directions will keep the company healthy, but at what cost to the imaginative strength of the toy? To remain profitable, Lego is selling future generations short.

Granted, Lego is not a punk band. It's the seventh-largest toy company in the world, earning $2 billion last year, selling its products in 138 different countries. And while Lego might crawl inside McDonald's Happy Meals too often for comfort, it still supports non-commercial activity that furthers and enriches childhood experience. The recent decision to fund a $5-million Lego Learning Lab at MIT's Media Laboratory, with a focus on developing new theories of learning, play and creativity, proves there is more at work than simple profit motive.

The Lego medium might be eroding, but as a cultural metaphor it has never been stronger. Polish artist Zbigniew Libera has attracted repeated bursts of controversy for his Lego concentration-camp models that, according to an artist statement, "Mix historical with contemporary references to represent our world, our little infernoŠ" Some corporations have started using the toy in workshops -- an $8,000 Serious Play Lego set includes specialized bricks to better express and encourage the hopes and fears of unhappy employees. And the IKEA furniture experience, which involves unpacking a box full of parts and then assembling them according to sequential instructions, is uncomfortably similar to Lego.

For older Legophiles, the fact that spartan bricks, the sort which once made up the bulk of sales, are now relegated to the bottom shelf, is disturbing. Worse, basic Lego is now packaged as "Creator" series, as if the plain stuff needed to be distinguished from its newer counterparts. The final insult, however, was a VHS tape of ideas and instructions included with one of the Creator sets I recently saw.

For those who view Lego as the creative architecture that underpins their adult lives, these changes frustrate our attempts to reconnect with our past. As the biodiversity of Legoland is clearcut, both young and old suffer. That today's Lego sets ask less from children is a result of diminished attention spans and stimulus overload, pressures that adults are not immune to either.

Maintaining a steady conversation with our younger selves requires patience, but we're constantly interrupted by rent paying and career cultivation and relationship nurturing. It's no wonder the Little One inside us all isn't allowed out to play more often -- we're too busy. Yet, the raw material of childhood is time, or more accurately, the inability to understand and conceptualize time like adults. When you are seven years old, two months of summer vacation represents a block of time so enormous as to be beyond comprehension.

A child's naive appreciation of time provides certain creative benefits. In his book Technics and Civilization, 20th century philosopher Lewis Mumford, argues that "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age." The invention of the mechanical clock, he believes, meant the rhythm of existence became less organic and more pervasive and strict: "When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence."

Similarly, only as children can we aggressively pursue unstructured playfulness. As we lose our lazy youth and acclimatize to grown-up life in the eternal present, we learn to distinguish the contours and textures of time. We are taught to slice up the days, weeks, months and years into their component parts to make life more manageable. But when time is apportioned in chunks, dribs and drabs, instead of being perceived as a long ribbon of forever, a pure state of child becomes impossible.

Most of us have to schedule quality time with the little guy or gal inside us. It's considered luxury, not necessity, to spend (read: waste) an indeterminate amount of time with no greater goal then goofing around. Our juvenile deficiency grows larger each time we pile rules and restrictions and assumptions upon the business of having fun. We somehow learn to be creative on command, to reliably churn out identity systems, logos, magazines and annual reports. And in the absence of steady bursts of childishness, we surround ourselves with reminders of the past.

Unfortunately, our relationship with childhood curios is now quite different. Proof of this can best be found in the explosion of eBay. We want to revisit our rec-rooms of yore, but now as collectors and curators, not as children trapped inside the body of an adult. We obsess about Mint and Near-Mint condition, even though the items of our past we loved so dearly were bent and dented past resale value.

The thrill comes not from the opportunity to once again use the toy as it was originally intended. Instead, the excitement is generated from the acquisition of the item in question; in being the person to successfully click the mouse at the last possible moment to ensure a symbolic victory over the tyranny of serious adult life. The power of nostalgia is directly proportional to the amount of play sacrificed for work.

These chunks of childhood form private little museums in cubicles, home offices and lofts around the world. Free to look at, but too expensive to touch -- as if each scuff or scratch might diminish the power of memory each item harbours.

Childish representations are easy to acquire, but genuine expressions of childishness remain precious and rare. The adult ability to harness a playful attitude accumulates slowly, a confidence in channeling immaturity through a mature brain develops slowly. Instincts buried in the bottom of a locked, forgotten toy chest of the soul slowly re-emerge. Second guessing oneself dissipates, spontaneous expressions of silliness occur.

But we're still more likely to buy old knick-knacks than spend time on ourselves. The rewards are more immediate and measurable. Even as we continue to protest and resist our accrued maturity, our actions say otherwise: Please don't touch the Lego moose.