Whenever the air conditioning turns on, and the ceiling fan is spinning overhead, I feel a certain feeling. It is hard to describe. Equal parts nostalgia, comfort, and excitement. And just the right amount of cool breeze. Those were the exact conditions of my childhood whenever I would get out my LEGO and get building, and whenever I feel those physical and mental sensations, I get the urge to pull out my LEGO and get to work.
Ideas flash through my mind, I feel inspired, and I want to build once more. The trouble is: I have no LEGO. I mean, I have a few sets around the place that I have purchased; a few Ultimate Collector Series, and favorite builds from Star Wars, but no collection of LEGO bricks just laying around waiting to be built. I don’t even have the vast majority of my minifigures anymore, having sold almost the very last of them a few months ago. I saved only my childhood figures, and a very few that go with a few of the sets I still have.
I am in what most Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL) call my Dark Ages. It is a term they use for when they left home to go to college, having been a kid that played with LEGO, and didn’t “play” or build with LEGO again until they were post collegiate adults, hence the term AFOL. Only for me, my Dark Ages came lately.
I took LEGO with me around the world to Papua New Guinea in high school, and to three colleges in the States and Lithuania. I then took them with me after university to my first home “on my own”. It was there that I first started to lose the love affair with LEGO. I sold most of my childhood LEGO when my wife left and I needed money to stay afloat. It was a very difficult decision, and one I still regret. I also sold many of the sets that I had collected in the years prior, many of which I wish I still had. Then I moved to Texas and carted LEGO from housing to housing, but sold what I had yet collected a few years later. As I said, I sold my minifigures just a few months ago.
Why?
My depression had grabbed hold and I no longer felt the joy of building. One of the last creations I built, a custom version of the Millennium Falcon, took all I had left. It was a difficult build to begin with, and never got easier. It was frustrating, never-ending, and in the end, still did not come out right. I was ready to call it quits after that. Then, I had saved several hundred minifigures for my toy photography, but it was right at that time that I had started to become enamored with six inch scale Star Wars action figures and the photography possibilities they represented. I lost the love of photographing tiny LEGO figures. These days I spend my discretionary funds on new action figures, and not LEGO.
Which makes the feelings I get in the afternoon, after work, all the more curious. Am I re-awakening long dormant feelings? Will I split my funds into LEGO and action figures? Will I build a LEGO man cave and get to construction once more with the small plastic bricks? I doubt it, at least, not now. I still remember the arduous Falcon build, and that stops me. But, there is the itching in my fingers I can’t ignore. My depression is better now, and I understand myself more than I did even a few years ago.
LEGO remains a huge, if largely sidelined, part of my life. I still consider myself an AFOL. Just…not an active one. My Dark Ages linger, and my glory days slip further away. But the encouraging thing is that life is not linear. It so often is cyclical. A “Golden Age” can become a “Silver Age” in a hurry. Things thought behind can appear on the horizon ahead.
I’m in no hurry. I feel that if I wish to pick up LEGO again it will happen when I am ready, and not before. (Honestly, right now, I don’t have the space to put into storing a bunch of LEGO.) I am content to let sleeping LEGO lie. For now. Feelings are great for keeping us inspired, energized, and comforted. They do not always need to be acted upon. Dark Ages? That term is so fraught with negative connotations. Better to call this a brick separation, and hope that one day a re-building will come. Who can say? In the build of life, we don’t get to see the entirety of the instruction booklet, just the page, and the build steps, that we are currently on. What we are even building sometimes we never know, as the construction continues beyond us. I am excited to turn the page, and see what comes next. Then I will sort out what I need, and add to what I have already assembled. It may be LEGO, it may be something else entirely! I can’t wait to find out.
a simple man 