The Magical Lego of Happiness

When our sons were younger, they would often sprawl on the floor for hours playing Legos. In the huge bucket that sat between the two of them, there were thousands of Legos of every shape, color, and size imaginable.

One day, when the boys were about 4 and 6, I peeked into their room to see my younger son working away happily, improvising a whimsical structure. Reaching into the bucket, he grabbed one tiny plastic brick after another, enjoying his creation as it grew and changed from a car to a robot to a space-age vehicle. He turned his creation this way and that, smiled contentedly, and then continued to build.

Our older son, noticing his brother’s happiness, eyed his younger sibling with envy and tried to make his own creation look just like his little brother’s. Carefully observing the elements of his little brother’s structure, he began to rake his fingers desperately through the bucket, trying to find just the Legos that were in the magically morphing creation that was bringing his brother so much joy.

After several minutes of fruitless searching for precisely the same combination of Legos, he sat back on his heels and glared at this brother and the structure he was working on. He was quite certain at that moment, observing his little brother’s happiness, that his brother must be in possession of some kind of magical Lego combination that was resulting in his joy. He begged his little brother for the Legos he was holding, but our younger son told him to look for his own. That was the final straw. Our older boy burst into tears.

I stepped into the room and asked him what was wrong and why he had stopped building. He pointed an accusing finger at our younger son and said, “He has the Lego I need.”

I was dumbstruck. Here he was sitting next to thousands of Legos. He could have taken any one of those tiny bricks and begun his own creation. But he wouldn’t. He was quite certain that his brother had the Magical Lego of Happiness.

It seems silly to us as adults that a child would stubbornly insist that he was one Lego shy of happiness. How ridiculous to lament the absence of one Lego when there were so many more available to him right at that moment. But we do precisely the same thing. We look at other people we believe to be happy, and we believe that the things that they have are the key to their happiness. If we could just have what they have, we too could be happy:

The magical shoes of happiness. The magical house of happiness. The magical job of happiness. The magical romance of happiness. We are always one possession or one promotion or one relationship shy of happiness. And like our son, we sit back on our heels and refuse to create our own happiness. We are waiting for someone to hand us our happiness, when in fact we have the building blocks of happiness with us all along.

If our older son had stopped looking at what his little brother had, he would have realized that in that bucket of Legos were millions of possibilities to create something new and wonderful that could bring him great joy and pleasure. But in fixating on what his brother had, he could not see the possibility to create something for himself.

If we only took a moment to look at the big bucket of building blocks in front of us — if we could find a way to appreciate the building blocks of happiness that we already have: our family, our friends, our health. The blue sky, a warm wind, fresh flowers. If we could see and appreciate how much we already have, we could begin to build our own happiness.

And that is where the real magic begins.