When I go to a family gathering I do a few routine things. Hug the family, steal a pickle, beg for a tea and an illustrious “foldover” special, and do my rounds. I check that everything has stayed the same since I have last visited my grandparents’ house. The secret passage is still working, the cuckoo clock still rings at eleven and not twelve, and the toys that they still keep despite having grown up grandchildren stay in their rightful places.
One toy in particular that I double check and then lust after playing is the lego that my Grandma still keeps in her tv cabinet. They are kept in a small tub and the pieces can’t be bigger than my fingernails, and yet if I find myself alone in that room I will sit cross-legged on the floor and twirl the pieces in my fingers, and remember the times I used to build houses, cars, hotels, islands, Hogwarts and a variety of other things that my mind could come up with.
My uncle is an engineer and loves to receive lego architecture sets for Christmas. My brother loves the pirate ship legos and my dad has always put them together. Call it nostalgia, but I think that the obsession with lego that some grownups has comes from craving for a creative outlet that was once accessible to them during childhood.
I remember the phase well when it became lame to play with toys or imaginative games. I remember asking my best friend if she wanted to play school (a game where she was in her bedroom and I in her sister’s and we would hardly speak to each other as we taught our respective classes various elementary topics. It was riveting) and she said that we were too old for that now. I secretly still played with my elggo, doll house, and make believe games when I was alone. To be honest there are still times of complete stress that I lose myself in my own imagination. Why is it so taboo to play?
It seems that lately the only times that I am asked to publically play is during “Ice Breaker” games during the first class or at a theatre workshop where we are meant to let go. I love the idea of rehabilitation through play, and how stress would be such a small thing if we all could “let go” and play more, play and allow ourselves to be creative. There is this stigma surrounding creativity that contrasts with structure, with facts, with research, but where did all of those things come from? Problem Solving could be renamed as Creative Thinking, and yet the scary C-word seems to disappear from required skills lists everywhere.
I vouch that we all go out and buy the newest lego set and set aside a half hour, maybe the half hour after the gym that we all tell ourselves we HAVE to do, and build our dream lego house, or our dream lego zoo’s, and forget our desks our tweets and our work, because if there’s one thing we know that creativity both enhances and also helps deal with mental health. We need a balance, but we also need to nurture that imagination that sprouted in youth and got told through education to hide away.
Xx Jess
her cosy notebook 