Zen and the Art of Sorting Lego Bricks

I got my first Lego set back in 1977 and things were different back then. Prior to 1978, most Lego sets didn’t come with many specialized pieces — mostly you got bricks, wheels, fences, arches, and little sloping pieces that were good for building ramps and roofs. Bricks came in black, white, red, yellow, and blue and you had green plates and trees and that was that.

In 1978 Lego released the Lego minifigure (aka the “minifig”). Before that we had weird bubble-headed people with interlocking pieces for arms and no body or legs (you had to build those yourself), and non-poseable figures that didn’t have printed faces. Everything changed with the release of the minifig. Suddenly instead of balloon-headed family members or generic townsfolk we had real people: soldiers, firemen, police officers, and my favorite figures, the spacemen.

Normally this is where you would expect me to launch into “old man” mode and talk about how things were before that, but not this time. These new little Lego people in their new little sets were fantastic. My favorite set at that time was the Yellow Castle, which came with yellow bricks (thus the name), a working drawbridge, and a whopping 14 medieval minifigs. At the same time, Lego was also releasing their new space line. Between the two, I was in Lego Heaven.

When you only have a few Legos you can store them in something small like a shoe box. Eventually I acquired so many that my mom gave me a square Tupperware container to put them in. I kept my Legos in that tub for a long time before I eventually needed a larger tub.

I don’t remember exactly when I quit playing with Lego blocks but it would have been around the time most other kids did. I wasn’t one of those kids that kept building things long after everyone else had moved on to other things. I built things, I played with with, and eventually I put them out in the garage.

Now one time when Mason was real young, like maybe three or four years old, I went to a garage and found a large tub of Lego bricks for sale. We’re talking about a ten gallon plastic tub full of Lego bricks — at current prices, well over a thousand dollars worth of blocks. The guy was asking $200 and ended up taking $100. By the time I combined those Lego bricks with the ones I already owned I had enough to fill a twenty gallon tub.

Shortly before Mason turned four, Lego Star Wars was released. Mason played with Lego bricks for a while but by the time he was old enough to use a game controller he was playing the electronic version.

We’ve pulled the tub of Lego bricks out once or twice for nostalgia’s sake (mine, not theirs), but for the most part they’ve been collecting dust. Over the past few weeks my friend Ben Langberg has been visiting the past by building some of those old classic space sets and posting pictures of them on Facebook.

Now one thing Ben does is he sorts his Lego bricks into different tubs by color. It’s something I always wanted to do but never had the time or motivation to do. Seeing all of Ben’s work on Facebook inspired me to drag the giant tub of bricks out of the closet, purchase some smaller tubs from Big Lots, and begin sorting.

I balanced the large tub of bricks on top of a milk crate in front of me, scattered the smaller empty tubs around, and started sorting. Over time the larger blocks work their way to the top while the little ones settle down toward the bottom, which makes sorting go quickly at first.

Despite what you think, you can’t hold that many Lego bricks in one hand. After about eight or nine I found that with each new block I picked up, another one fell back into the tub. I also discovered that throwing handfuls of Lego bricks into tubs is not the most accurate delivery system. Occasionally I would miss and occasionally I would forget which color I was holding, adding just a dash of yellow to the red tub.

I had no system in regards to which color to sort first. I simply leaned my head inside the tub and started picking for whichever color I saw the most of. After picking a handful or two of red bricks I’d shift to blue, and then yellow, and then white — again in no order whatsoever.

Over the past three days I’ve spent roughly six hours sorting Lego bricks. In the evenings or when idle I put on a podcast to listen to and then throw my head into the tub. Sticking with my original unit of measurement, of the twenty gallons of bricks I started with I’d say I’m down to two — however, these two may be the most time consuming of all to sort. They are the little bits, the tiny 1×1 blocks that have wormed their way to the bottom of the bucket and seemingly multiplied when I wasn’t looking. Hundreds and hundreds of them in every color, waiting to be touched. As the blocks continued to shrink the more my hands began to cramp as the dexterity required to pluck each little brick out of a sea of of blocks became more and more precise.

I don’t mean to make it sound like like sorting Lego blocks is brain surgery; on the contrary, it’s a pretty relaxing little exercise, one in which your mind can relax and wander and listen to things and really think. It’s very soothing.

When I’m all done I’m thinking about dumping them all back into the big tub and starting all over again.