Starting in the 1930s, LEGO’s founder Ole Kirk Christiansen had created toys using wood and other materials. When a fire in 1960  41  the company’s warehouse containing wooden toys, Christiansen decided to concentrate all efforts on one single product: the plastic LEGO brick. LEGO bricks are not associated with  42 , sex, political viewpoints, or controversial topics, and the company has deliberately sought to develop a “safe” image.  43 , during the last decades this image of LEGO has also come to present a problem, because children increasingly  44  more teenage-like leisure activities, influenced by adult topics circulating in the media. For the growing generation of “tween”-agers, this safe image could easily be synonymous with “  45 .”

        Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve. While such concerns must be taken very seriously, they are not invincible. They can be overcome when we don’t lock our door to the outside world. 

        Happiness can only be discovered as a gift of harmony between the whole and each single component. Even science--and you know it better than I do--points to an understanding of reality as a place where every element connects and interacts with everything else. 

        And this brings me to my second message. How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. When one realizes that life, even in the middle of so many contradictions, is a gift, that love is the source and the meaning of life, how can they withhold their urge to do good to another fellow being?