So, as I watched the waitress wearily picking up her 11,378th piece of stray Lego of the day and absentmindedly popping it back into a Lego storage box, I considered more than the amount of germs present in each children’s activity pack (but I really did consider those germs, imagine, so very many germs😳).

We didn’t really do Lego as children. I remember we found some old-style 60s/70s lego in the loft which must have belonged to a parent or younger uncle but it was red, white and grey and utterly uninspiring. I don’t recall making anything from it other than a few weird shapes and am pretty sure both Kate (my sister) and I lost interest pronto. I was much more into computers, my BMX, Care Bears, Snugglebums (sic), and other collectables. As I don’t have children and my niece is only just Duplo age, the magic of lego, until this week, had passed me by so please do bear with.

The thing is, and forgive me for stating the obvious here, Lego constructions are not permanent. Don’t mention that to the people who built the beautiful sculptures in Legoland…ssh. Although there are thousands of things you can buy which have a definite shape or goal in mind (such as the T1 Camper I was just ‘bullied’ into buying by a massive Lego fan…I’m looking forward to its therapeutic effect, all 1,000+ pieces of it 😯); you can also start from nothing, build something, then destroy it and start all over again.

I watched children doing exactly that in the restaurant last night. If you don’t have the piece you want, make do with something else but most importantly let (it) go. By the time the children’s pizzas had arrived, the pieces were broken back up into uneven chunks and were back in the box, ready for the next set of paws to start creating.

The Lego isn’t broken, the pieces still work and they are the same but the next time, they might be a completely different shape of have a different colour scheme. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is the process – and this was the point my very good friend was trying to make when persuading me of the merits of Lego – the patience required, the quiet and the focus you need to apply, the sense of achievement and having created something when you have finished or even during the time you are building it.

I think as adults we have a much harder time walking away from what we have constructed; we are afraid of ‘starting from scratch’ as it took us so long to get ‘here’; we feel we have invested too much. Wherever, whatever or whomever ‘here’ is. We also forget that the pieces we have used – ourselves: our feelings, personality and experiences – can be used in more than one way, many times over.

The thing is though, most of us have actually started again in some aspect of our lives; whether we’ve said goodbye to an unhappy marriage or what we thought was a happy relationship, lost a loved one (or two), lost a dream job (or even a crappy one), had to give up on a dream or had to adapt due to a health scare.

We didn’t want to change anything because it was either great or it was simply safe or if we were honest, we just could not face the upheaval. Yet, when we do change the shape or colour of ‘here’, although we take tentative steps at first, still preferring the old ‘here’, we eventually find that even if we don’t like it better, we still like it, just differently.

Change will not always be for the better in absolute terms but it will happen whether we like it or not and whether we le-go and go with the change or not will make the difference between living a full and happy new version of life or a life of looking back and never forward. Clinging on to our former Lego creations won’t get us far but it might make us feel safe for a while.

I’m for having a good go at building this ‘expert level’ Lego model when I get back. Then I think I have to be brave enough to break it into pieces again for someone else to have a go. Gulp.