Lego Mindfulness: Play Your Way into Calm

Many years ago, a friend of mine ordered an enormous Lego Millenium Falcon from some online Lego Star Wars store. It was extremely expensive and, as an added bonus, came with the entire crew; Chewie and Han and Luke and Leia, so, knowing he would never hear the end of it from his wife, he placed the order behind her back and had it delivered to our work place. Don’t tell anyone.

Instead of smuggling it home, he began constructing the spacecraft during lulls and breaks, and managed to finish somewhat quickly. It was gigantic, about a meter in diameter, and surprisingly heavy. The Lego Millenium Falcon, with the heroes of the saga in the cockpit – sorry if I get the lingo wrong, I don’t know that much about spaceships, even the Millenium Falcon, although out of all the spaceships it is also my favorite – stood in the middle of the projection room, on the fifth floor, on a secure table, for years. The crew were all separate and movable, so many a time the poor creatures became the butts of inane practical jokes: they would be joined in a kick line, or having heated group sex, or doing something else inappropriate, when Jones came to work. Of course, he always rescued them and placed them gently back into position. But, the horsing around with the creatures aside, no matter how hard anyone would fight with Jones, despite any number of differences in opinion or worldview, no one ever, ever, messed with the craft itself.

The spacecraft sort of became the workplace mascot, and when Jones managed to work up the nerve, or remembered, or just figured enough time had gone by, and took it home with him one night, we were all sad and felt we, too, had somehow lost it, even though it never belonged to any of us in the first place.

Those who are familiar with my Instagram account are well aware of the co-called Swedish Death Cleaning I have been conducting all last week at my parents’ house. The somewhat horrific phrase means, in all simplicity, very much in the Marie Kondo vein, coming to terms with all of one’s shit and giving everything one doesn’t exactly need any longer a decent throwing out and getting on with it, instead of leaving the horrendous deed to the next generation to deal with after we are gone.

I, of course, having no children of my own, will be making my own Death Cleaning for all eternity after I bite the dust, but going through all my childhood and teenage stuff nevertheless proved an immeasurably fantastic and emotional journey through time for me, and what I ended up saving was perhaps altogether different stuff from what one might have expected.

For instance, I stumbled on a truly marvelous coffee mug with a picture of the Sony Creative Penjamin penguin, with the year 1982 in small print at the bottom, that I immediately placed in the Save -pile, along with a giant stuffed Pingu the penguin, my collection of small metallic cars whose doors open and close, my Donald Duck block puzzle, my wooden Letter Blocks, my Barbie paraphernalia – meaning the various stuff, not the Barbies themselves, because they must have known the Death Cleaning was at hand and fled at the last minute to Sweden maybe. You know, it is the neighboring country here.

Not everything brought back sweet and fragrant memories, however. I had saved a bunch of really fucked-up letters I received during high school. Why I don’t know. To the thrash. Also, I found a box containing every single Christmas greeting card I had ever gotten. All sorts of flyers and leaflets of events I had never even attended. All my school drawings? I was never an artist. They were horrible, and bless mother for saving them all these years. Nevertheless, toss them. I did, however, save five or six pictures that made me tear up with laughter. The sun shining and smiling with a full set of perfectly round teeth, looking more like a troll than actual sun. A poem with an illustration, made perhaps on the second or third grade, with four verses, having to do with my name and its rhymes, and my pants. It is so fabulous, and shows such genius and craftsmanship in the making, I shall include it here in full:

Minä olen Tuija/I am Tuija

Enkä mikään muija/And not some bitch

Minulla on housut/I am wearing trousers

Eikä mitkään lousut/And not some kablousers

Apologies for the lousy translation, but truthfully, not much is lost in it this time. I had made delightful illustrations all around the written work of different colored pants floating in the air.

I found my Wayne’s World cap, my Love Is… eraser that I had made sure nobody used for its actual purpose because I thought it was so pretty. I found mountains of pictures cut out from magazines and newspapers, pictures of actors and scenes from movies, clippings of reviews, and all sorts of memorabilia, movie ticket stubs, taped soundtrack albums, original soundtrack albums on tape. Ghostbusters. Both the tape version, and the vinyl. About fifty different movie posters from the late Eighties and early Nineties, back when they used to have yearly clearing sales at one of the independent movie theaters in town, and I would go buy three for a tenner. Turned out I had bought Groundhog Day twice.

What was truly surprising was the discovery of my View-Master. I had been sure the device had been lost in time somewhere, and to find it, neatly stacked between the toy train and some hand puppets, was really a moment to remember. It even had one reel of slides left to watch, the most boring one, granted, with the different kinds of garden flowers, and not, for example, the one depicting the Walt Disney animation The Black Cauldron – where was that one, by the way?, but still. And I must add, as a huge fan of Stranger Things, these findings made me happy beyond belief, and reinforced my instinctual trust in the magic of human psychology and in how everything we experience for the first time in our childhood comes back later to haunt us in the most wonderful ways. Look at any of my stories. Hell, look at the Duffer Brothers.

I even discovered my very first toy, a nude bath doll with painted tufts of hair on top of her head and large eyes wide open, with a suggestion of a smile on her face that seemed to say that it is okay to be a kid, really, because a nice bath is waiting and what’s not to love about that.

I was mesmerized. By my own past, my girlhood parading herself in front of me. By what I had at one time or another decided was important enough to save for later. By all the emotions brought back from leafing old notebooks and address books. Even the movie ticket stubs made me remember stuff I had long ago forgotten. With whom I saw some movie, what I thought of it back then. What it felt like, playing with my sister’s studded leather belt I wasn’t allowed to touch at all. What was also mesmerizing was how meticulously I had organized everything in boxes and containers.

And. Here it comes. The Legos. The Legos. Oh-my-god, as Janice would say on Friends. I spent hours and hours arranging and rearranging them on the floor, documenting my findings, then playing some more. Of course, being a grownup now, my playing consisted mainly of arranging my darlings into a Twin Peaks diorama, an idea that first came to me because the Elephant Man was missing an arm, trying to figure who was who, positioning the creatures so as to get the best shots of the characters and scenes on my smartphone. I was so deep into my Legos, father had to butt in not once but twice, letting me know in the gentlest way possible, that sauna was ready and maybe I could take a small break from my toys to go. “Yeah yeah yeah dad, in a minute!” I answered from the floor of my old room, in my best Petulant Daughter Who’s Busy with More Important Stuff -voice.

And I have to tell you, never in my life I don’t recall concentrating so hard, so exclusively, in one particular thing, apart from when I am writing, than when I was playing with my damn toys.

Perhaps it was the emotional content, more than the actual toys. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Losing the house is bad enough. The Legos were coming with me, man. Everything I still found delightful and funny went into my permanent collection and rode back with me to my grownup’s apartment, which is changing fast into a toy den. By the time I got back home I felt an irrational but powerful surge to get my stupid books out of the way to make room for my many toys. So far, though, I am trying to make room with the merry and not by exclusion.

  

       

Maybe I am the last person on Earth to rediscover to joys of Legos. But in case I am not, I am telling you, go buy yourself some! Or better yet, go check out the attic of your childhood home and rediscover the engineer that was once you, as a kid. The therapeutic value is immeasurable. I’m so impressed with my new soothing mechanism I’m sure my man will be using the phrase You’re getting agitated again, maybe we should break out the Legos for many years to come.

Jones, I apologize for ratting you out.