life | Inappropriate Footwear

lego-3 I think the two most transformative toys of my childhood were my bike, and Lego. The bicycle might earn a place in this list at some stage, but today I want to talk about magical Danish bricks.

Five things Lego taught me about life

1. Lego taught me perseverance

The sound of my hand moving back and forth between one thousand plastic pieces in a wooden drawer. A pause as I draw up a helpful looking piece. The wrinkling of my brow as I realise it is too long, or too short. The feeling of the gentle-sharp bricks against my skin as I re-sift. The presence of a dozen four by four bricks when all you want is a six by four. Alanis Morissette would sympathise. The satisfaction as I finally roll a blue one-er between my fingers, all I need to complete the periscope on Captain Nemo’s submarine. Lego rewarded perseverance.

These days the hunts for a lost piece are over wider areas: Car keys, credit cards, camera chargers. As I try to remember where I left something, that old Lego drawer could be a metaphor for my ageing brain, my consciousness trawling back and forth between irrelevant information, trying to draw out the one piece I need. Maybe I should keep all those useful things in a wooden drawer. Good idea Lego.

2. Lego taught me competitive spirit (or perhaps selfishness)

The battles to the last part. My brother, sister and I combing frantically, harvesting wheels in the race to build the most powerful battle truck. Their younger eyes, my longer arms, I lean further and further over the drawer attempting to obscure their views. Lego and a shared pack of fish and chips were the two surest way to encourage my competitive edge as I hoarded blue bricks and hot chips with the watchfulness of a lioness and the selfishness of an elder brother. I don’t think I ever wished my siblings would disappear, but I did sometimes imagine how much more simple life would have been if they’d been born with little baby t-rex arms…

3. Lego left gaps for my imagination

A brick is a wall, is a building, is a spaceship blast-door. The most powerful thing about Lego was that it left space for my imagination. Jagged brick lines became a dragon’s tail, a pirate’s whip (everyone in my imagination had whips after Indiana Jones) or a breaking wave. Spit would fly as I added a juddering soundtrack of explosions, laser blasts or dragster wheels spinning. The joy really was in the neutrality of the bricks, they were simply a stepping off point to a story. The creators of Dr Who understood that dodgy props and costumes don’t matter, as long as you’ve engaged the viewer’s imagination.

4. Lego encouraged versatile thinking

Perhaps because Lego let me imagine I could build anything, it also encouraged me to think outside the bricks. At its core it was a building set, and it played well with others. It had hinge and hooks, holes and connectors. With a rubber band I could enable a catapult to fire, or make the world’s most delicate tank tracks. One of my friends got a Pez dispenser for his birthday. I eventually swallowed my envy and built one out of Lego. Ok, my fish bowl wasn’t so successful, but the epic flyovers us kids built for the slot car set were Californian in scale, if a little third world in execution.

Lego didn’t make me an overnight engineer, but I learned that if I didn’t have something, then I could make it. So I built medieval weapons in Granddad’s workshop, tea-stained treasure maps in the kitchen, and launched hand-crafted rubber-band powered planes with Dad on the driveway. I’m convinced that a childhood of making and crafting has contributed to my conviction that I can make do with less.

5. Lego was a hardening agent and a catalyst for curses

For every miracle of Scandinavian toy creation there is a dark side. Bare footed night-time walks to the bathroom were the best way to hunt out lost bricks. Actually maybe that’s just a spectacularly good design feature, no piece of Lego was ever lost for long. Lego prepared my feet for jerky barefoot walks down gravel paths, and jolting runs over hot black sands. Unfortunately it also earned me a few scoldings for the foul-mouthed language of discovery, but other people treading on misplaced bricks did help widen my cursive vocabulary. Very useful for blending in at Glaswegian festivals.

Still, I’d much rather run over a pit of hot coals than a blanket covered in those jagged-edged plastic shards. A blessing and a curse then.

Lego as guru

Dear Lego,

You taught me of Dependability and versatility. You were an aid to my story telling. You taught me never to get too attached to my creations, as the next day they would need to be demolished to make way for whatever came next. You tried to teach me that there was no such thing as perfection, that it was ok to have an all red sports car, except for one side of the bonnet. We had to agree to disagree there.

Thank you Lego, for the part you played in my own construction. And thank you Mum and Dad, for paying over the odds for a Danish toolkit for my imagination.

Much love,

x Regan

mortality There are dates within a year which tend to prompt self-reflection. My birthday, St Patricks Day, Hallowe’en. On these dates I usually find myself attempting an appraisal of my existence. I think of highlights and disappointments, of what has been present and what has been missing. I often then end up giving myself some sort of school teacher’s assessment. ‘Regan needs to find more productive activities on which to focus his energy.’ ‘Regan is prone to spending a little too much time day-dreaming in class.’ ‘Must try harder.’ And then there’s some sort of mental promise to myself to make changes.

I never thought to apply a score when I look at my life to date. I mean I can’t really look at it like an album or film review, I haven’t yet had a chance to enjoy the entire performance. But if I did have to rate myself, I can’t think of a time when I’d have given myself a perfect ten. Perhaps today I would give myself a seven. Recognition that there have been some standout achievements amongst the scattering of self-triggered disappointments. And as always, acknowledgement that there’s room for improvement. Up until quite recently though, I never really thought about whether there was time for improvement.

Death has always been an abstract idea for me. I thought occasionally about the final moments, the actual end point. Would I rather drown in a sea of lava or choke on a hotdog? Which Metallica song would I have play at my funeral? But not until I started losing people did I really understand that my time on earth is finite. I only have an unknowable number days left in which to train for a marathon, write a best-selling novel, and/or undo the psychic damage of mistakes I’ve made in the past. Lately though mortality has started to have an effect on my understanding of the world. I’m beginning to understand that my choices are made against a finite span of time.

And now I can see the that I might be able to utilise those times of deliberation and contemplation in order to make useful changes. I can imagine two different personality-dependent approaches to ensuring that the rest of my life can be used to drag up my overall rating. If I imagine my life as a graph, a jagged chart of time versus enjoyment, with each upward spike a moment of joy, or kindness or ecstasy, and each downward dip a failure of morality, character or heart. If I want to use my remaining days above the ground to improve my overall score, I can look at affecting either the time-scale, or the enjoyment-scale.

If I was a certain type of person, I would concentrate on extending the time scale. I would make choices which I hoped would ensure I survived for long enough to achieve more happy spikes. Maybe I start to reduce my exposure to risks. Perhaps my next birthday would be a meal in a small restaurant, close to home, rather than two weeks in a war zone. I might take out insurance in order to protect myself from incidents. Rather than saving for airfares, I’d harbour money for my later years, protection against poverty. My New Year’s resolutions would be used to set restrictions and goals which promote durability over excitement. ‘Drink less’, ‘eat better’, ‘run more often’. You can probably tell from my tone that I’ve opted to take another path.

Rather than plotting to make it to my hundredth birthday I’d rather make the most of however many birthdays an active and varied life grants me. If my life is a book then I’d rather it was a mid-length thriller than a thousand-page health and safety manual. I’d rather take a few risks than avoid all of them. At the end of a year I’m more interested in promises to myself which excite me. ‘Visit a country that scares me’, ‘make my own surfing movie’, ‘learn enough French to say “Two beers please, my friend is paying”.

Of course there are issues with opting for a (potentially) shorter, brighter life. Most of the time I don’t have a Plan B. I go to the doctor when I’m in pain rather than when I want assurance. But the one really problematic side I see to my approach to life, is that there is a degree of selfishness implicit in focusing so much on my own desire to extract all I can from as many moments as possible.

My drive to see more of the world, to hear more from its people, necessitates that I’m rarely in one job or city or neighbourhood for very long. This means that my new friendships are frequently fleeting, that I don’t get a chance to warm them into something more permanent. There’s a melancholy there at times, when I see an update on Facebook from someone I once spent just a few days with. Someone I wish I could have engaged with more, offered more to, drawn more from. One thing experience has taught me is that people are always a component in my happiest moments. Someone to help gather wood for the fire, someone to play guitar while I sing, someone to high-five when I hang ten.

As I write this on the last day of 2016, consideration of my mortality helps me understand what I want from whatever remains of my life. I’m not great at making promises to myself anymore. I’ve failed once too often at the ‘must eat less at Christmas time’ pledge. But tonight I’ll be thinking of the people who I’ve met, who have triggered curiosity, and wonder, and who have inspired me to be a better version of myself. And I’ll promise to try harder to reach one hand back towards old friends as I hold the other out towards new ones. Because although I don’t know how many days I have left in the world, I do know that I want as many of them as possible to be shared with those people who teach me to fly, rather than those who tell me it is too dangerous to try.

So to all those who shared smiles and laughs with in 2016, thank you. To all those I wish I’d had more time with, I’ll try harder in 2017. And to those who passed beyond my reach, I’ll look for you in the stars when I next dance under the blanket of night.