There is a dreaminess to childhood, a moving slowly from one thing to another, that gets torn away under the pressure of time.
P. 224, Everyday Blessings, Kabat-Zinn

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters

Rita Smilkstein
The brain is the Learning organ
When a person experiences, processes, practices a specific skill or concept or area of knowledge, specific dendrites, which look like twigs on a tree (dendrite, in fact means “tree-like”), grow on specific neurons. These neurons then connect with other specific neurons when specific dendrites connect at specific synapses to create a specific neural network that is that specific concept, skill, or area of knowledge.
The more their brains’ dendrites grow, connect, and create larger, more complex neural networks, the more learners know: The more they grow, the more they know; the more they know, the more they grow. In other words, the brain’s learning process, as researched and as described here, is that specific learning occurs when and because the brain constructs specific connections and thus reconstructs itself.
Just as each higher twig on a tree needs to grow on a twig that is already there, each new, higher level of knowledge and skill (I.e., larger neural network) needs to be constructed on a lower-level, foundational, prerequisite, preliminary neural network that is already there. A gap occurs when the prerequisite, lower-level neural network is missing and there is nothing the learner can connect to-nothing the learner can grow on-in order to make sense of and understand the new knowledge, concept, or skill.

Since we never return it, we do not borrow time but have to steal it, snatch it from whatever takes time. P. 126, A Natural sense of wonder, Rick Van Noy

Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark. George Iles

“But in children, cultivate the wonder as a foundation for facts.” An important theme to the “the wonder book” (Rachel Carson) would be this direct pathway into the unity and awe of nature:

It is important for a child to have some direct knowledge, from an early age, of lives other than human – some of the thousands upon thousands of species that, even as he does, inhabit this earth. He should be aware of them, it as creatures described in books, or as a word in a crossword puzzle, but animals living in his own world, searching for food, caring for their young, struggling to survive in the face of difficulties.
P. 134, A natural sense of wonder, Rick Van Noy

…a young person understands little about time and passing of it. They still live close to the present, looking more toward the near future. Every moment is now, and days are a stream of them we can never step in twice. The nows slip past, the future becomes present. P. 125, A Natural Sense of Wonder, Rick Van Noy

Not too much is new as we grow older, but with children we rediscover the newness and brightness we once knew…
P. 125, A natural sense of wonder, Rick Van Noy