Member-only story
Of life and Legos
Sharing my reflections on life while assembling my first Lego set
I built my first Lego set at 28 years young.
I was thinking a lot about life while assembling it. It was almost meditative for me. Flip the page, find the piece, and click it into place. There was a certain rhythm and beauty to it.
While building, I thought about how the process captured certain parts of life. The amount of detail and how everything fit together was often unexpected. And a lot of the pieces that go into it are hidden later, as the exterior pieces shield them from view.
I thought this was an apt metaphor for life. Sometimes the pieces seem kind of random, but later in life, you’re able to look at all the pieces and fit them together into a cohesive narrative.
This is a process I call “self-authorship.” (And no, I did not invent this term. I heard it from one of my education courses in college.) You write your own story and make sense of your own life. Because creating a hero’s journey from your own life is extraordinarily empowering.
But in the end, you produce something amazing from all those odds and ends.
Of course, life is forever a work in progress, but the process is everything. There’s meaning to be found in every step of the way, although it’s hard to take a step back and look at the bigger picture every now and then.
But isn’t that beautiful? Life is in the assembly. At least, that’s what I learned from building my first Lego set. :)
