I was standing in the Lego store, trying to choose a Christmas present (yes, I am already doing that) for my five-year-old cousin, when I found myself staring at rows and rows of coloured boxes - castles, cities, spaceships - each promising that, with enough patience and small plastic pieces, something whole could emerge.
It struck me how miraculous that promise is: the idea that you can make something meaningful by assembling fragments, piece by piece, in no particular hurry. You follow the instructions, or you don’t. You make mistakes, take things apart, start again. And somehow, out of the chaos, a structure appears - imperfect, but recognizably yours.
I thought about how I’ve been doing the same thing all along. Not with bricks, but with days, choices, memories - the scattered pieces of a life. I never really had a master plan. I’ve just been building as I go, trying to make sense of the shape taking form under my hands. Sometimes I follow the picture on the box. Sometimes I invent something that doesn’t look like much but feels right (like, let’s say, this Substack). There’s a quiet discipline in this kind of building. It teaches you patience, proportion, the grace of revision. You start to understand that beauty isn’t in the finished thing, but in the act of making - in the slow, deliberate fitting-together of parts that may not always belong. Some days you build something solid, some days you dismantle what you thought you wanted. The work continues, quietly, without applause.
Watching kids play in the Lego store, I realized how absorbed children are in that process - how they build not to finish, but to just be building. There’s no anxiety about perfection, no fear of collapse. They just create, piece by piece, joyfully attentive to the moment before the next one. They trust that every shape, even the ones that fall apart, leads somewhere.
I envied that unselfconscious absorption - the freedom to make and unmake without judgment. At some point, we learn to call that play work and begin to measure what we build by how complete or impressive it looks. We forget that creation is an ongoing state, not a finished product. Lately I’ve been thinking that maybe the most honest way to live is to return to that childlike patience: to assemble and disassemble, to keep making, knowing that the structure will never be final. Each choice, each day, each small kindness is a piece that finds its place, even if the design changes.
Maybe that’s what I’m doing - what we’re all doing. Building, revising, tending to the architecture of our own becoming. A quiet, lifelong project made of ordinary pieces: time, care, forgiveness, hope. And maybe the goal isn’t to finish the structure at all, but to keep building - patiently and imperfectly, but with love.