Life As Lego Pieces
This year with The Zigzag I would like to share more tools to help with creative problem-solving. Tools that can be applied to our personal lives or work. Their fundamentals are cross-cutting.
I will however also infuse thought experiments every once in a while as the spirit leads đ.
Today, I would like to share a problem-solving method I learnt from Ayse Birsel, Itâs called Deconstruction and Reconstruction.
I will use Lego blocks to explain. It helps when you feel stuck or trying to figure stuff out.
Divide every difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve itâ - Rene Descartes.
DeconstructionÂ
Imagine you have built a beautiful skyscraper Lego house (the house here is representative of life) but you are not feeling this house anymore.Â
What you do is disassemble all the pieces to see how you put them together. The sitting room, kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms are pulled apart and examined. Let these separate parts represent the different parts of your life; family, spiritual, relationships, parenting, work, and community.Â
What activities and functions make these up right now?Â
After you have looked at the pieces from the different components of your parts of life, the nuts and bolts of them.
Then comes the Reconstruction part.
Still on the house analogy, with all the pieces apart, you now have to decide what type of house you feel will suit you based on the type of life you now want.Â
The type of life you will feel happy with. Say the other house had so many rooms and now all your kids have left and you will feel happier in a smaller house. Or vice versa.Â
You could also examine just parts, eg you look at the kitchen, are there elements of it you want to keep and some you want to be added to the new remodel?
Identify the things that are most important to you that you want to have in your life, freedom, meaningful relationships, physical fitness, adventure, inner peace, sense of security that you want as part of your new life and the ones you want to removeÂ
This is how you reconstruct, based on what makes sense for the life / insert what other situation, you now want when putting together the new pieces. You could use elements of the old brick or introduce new pieces.Â
The analogy Arye used in her deconstructing and reconstructing was chicken soup. She deconstructed everything it takes to make a chicken soup.Â
For her reconstruction, she swapped chicken for Tofu. Instead of the âsoupâ (or whatever she makes of it as it will no longer be the same soup) being served hot, she thought how about freezing it? Instead of being served in a bowl, how about using a stick like a popsicle or a lollipop, this way it can be eaten on the move instead of having to sit at a table. Something you can eat in space;Â why not call it space soup?
You see, we can use components of our lives and reimagine how it looks and feels. Introduce new elements like she did the stick. Or replace things; tofu for chicken.
I was having a conversation with my brother a few days ago and he said that going to the gym like he used to might not fit into the things he wants to achieve this year.
I told him that the focus should be keeping fit so if going to the gym doesnât work, he can set up a small home gym or do other forms of home workout. The primary thing is not to compromise his health if that's important to him because he doesnât have time to go into a space called a gym to achieve that.
Our lives are constantly in flux and should be prepared to keep deconstructing and reconstructing as long as we donât lose sight of the most important things.
As long as we are alive, we can keep rearranging and recreating our lives.
Keep going,
Ije