Lego Pieces

 Time for me to get back into a habit of writing.

It's New Year's Day. I'd planned originally to spend the day crash-course prepping my spring classes, which start in under two weeks.

Instead, my best friend texted early this morning with an invitation to spend the day building Lego at his place. It was a day well spent, I think. I had a backlog of Lego sets--the TIE Bomber from Star Wars, Bumblebee the transformer (who actually transforms!), and the Ghost and Phantom from Ahsoka (and Star Wars: Rebels). I'd gotten those sets in various bouts of gift-getting and splurge-buying over the last year. Yet they sat in their boxes for who knows how long. 

Lego-building is an extravagance. It demands time and some effort, all to create a fragile thing to look at or play with. No set lasts forever. I'm reminded of a Zen insight from Frank Ostaseski's The Five Invitations. Recalling a time a visitor broke a valued piece of pottery belonging to a Buddhist monk, Ostaseski focuses us on the monk's reply: The cup was always broken. 

Lego embody mortality and transience. They take care and attention to build, they're a wonder to enjoy and show off, but once built they can only break. And they break so easily--a part comes loose here, a bookshelf or display case collapses, a cat decides to investigate--it's like they yearn to return to their original status as mixed bricks and flats. My friend, for example, had an enviable collection we had built together, only to lose it all when his bookshelf fell, shattering them all. In a bit of sort-of-Buddhist insight, he let the old sets go, gathering the pieces to donate somewhere. His shelf cleared, he found room to open new boxes that had been waiting--and to invite me to build with him.

Someone on Reddit today asked if anyone thought that one day a carefully preserved collection of Lego might be cherished and shown off and handed down like a grandmother's prized teacup collection. I suppose it's possible, but more than likely any personal collection of sets shares the same destiny as most repositories of stuff. It's ultimately trash. 

Of course, the pleasure of Lego is that, once destroyed, the pieces can find new life as something else, some new creation. The Lego sets of my childhood (Space was my bag back then) were advertised not only with the starship or sci-fi rover one could build with the instructions but also with pictures of the other possible vehicles one could create with that same set. Now sets are so precisely, ingeniously specific (the Bumblebee that actually transforms from car to robot and back) that free-form play is rarer, more the realm of dedicated Legoistas. And let me tell you, after spending eight hours piecing together Bumblebee and the TIE Bomber, I'm in no mood to contemplate shattering them anytime soon.

But they will shatter someday. I hope their pieces find their way into new creations and not (as I fear) merely end up in a landfill.

More important than the sets themselves was the gift my friend gave me of time and company. He negated my busyness with a different kind of activity. We built together all day, marveling at how clever the designers were, cursing the dropped piece as we hunted for it, wondering exasperatedly whether some tiny piece had been left out. That latter frustration almost always turns out to be a false alarm. The piece we'd hunted for so hard was underneath another piece the whole time. We laughed and talked and joked and watched Drawfee on YouTube.

And then--at one point--I discovered a tiny piece from my set that did seem to be missing. I shook out the brick bags, checked my piles, looked again at my work, and nope: a tiny little piece the instructions called for was not there. My friend hopped up, went to his pile of ruined, yet-to-be-donated Lego pieces, and picked out a brick matching the one I couldn't find.  

It was a good day.