For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved playing with Lego. The love hasn’t dimmed as I’ve gotten older; Lego’s role in my life has just changed. Where once it was about the stuff of play – about discovering how objects interact and about how I could at the same time give shape to and spark my imagination – as an adult I would occasionally turn to the calm, methodical accretion of a set’s blocks as a way of quieting stress and anxiety.
Our daughter got some Duplo for Christmas, and it’s been wonderful to play with her. Of course we play with her all the time, but it is usually asymmetrical. The pleasure my wife and I got from the play was meta-level; we enjoyed seeing Ada develop and become curious and then work to sate that curiosity, and of course we enjoyed the simple fact of the time together, but there wasn’t much enjoyment to be wrung for us from the activities and games themselves.
This is different, because while all that meta-pleasure is just as present, we’re both surprised by how much delight and fun we’re getting from the Duplo itself.
And it’s exactly because of that curiously cyclical sparking and feeding of imagination. Sometimes I’ll set out to reify an object that’s in my head, but more often than not I’m just noodling about with bricks – these big, coarse voxels in unexpectedly beautiful renderings of simple colours – and either end up creating pleasingly nonsense objects, or I’ll turn over what I have in my hands to find that it suddenly looks like a whale, or a truck, or an oddly stooping old lady. It’s something akin to pareidolia, or what the creator of those Lego ads was tapping into – another take on “the pictures are better on radio”.
It’s silly, I guess, to find this quiet joy surprising, since I can’t remember a time without Lego, but it is. It turns out I had simply forgotten that this was a thing Lego could be; not only a tool by which to construct a given object, whether realistic or fantastic, but also something that one almost has a dialogue with, something that you grip and manipulate and query and listen to as you play without direction – like a child does. And as I am rediscovering how to, thanks to my own.