Life is a Jenga tower and the cancer brick is in there somewhere. This stealth brick holds all the chaos.
Pre-cancer, you build your base and keep adding bricks without much thought.
Each brick represents a life moment and a decision. The tower builds in height and it feels solid and stable.
As things progress and life takes over, you keep adding more bricks. Your tower might be strong but more likely than not, it’s not exactly straight, it might be leaning a bit but nevertheless, you plough on.
There comes a point where you have a bit of a wobble and you get the feeling that some things just don’t stack up. You’ve built your world up but you realise it’s time to do a bit of subtraction and take a few bricks out to make life easier.
Of course, you don’t take them from the top, you take the bricks from somewhere within the tower.
You appreciate what’s happening. You tell yourself that while most single blocks can be taken out without compromising the structure, you also know that when critical combinations of blocks are removed, the system collapses.
But you plough on because you say, “It won’t happen to me.”
Some bricks come out easily enough and that’s great but some are trickier. You know you can’t move one without it having impact on every other one so you have to make some difficult choices.
Some bricks appear to be important, but, when removed, have little impact on your life.
Then there are bricks that are doing all the work. They are holding everything together.
The mental health bricks are the ones to watch out for. They are holding up a lot of weight and can go at any moment.
There are bricks that need removing – these are the toxic decisions you’ve made and so they’ve got to come out.
Then there’s the bricks labelled ‘anxiety’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘doubt’ and ‘insecurity’. You don’t need ’em so you pull them out the best you can. Some don’t want to budge. This makes you cautious.
Of course, it’s not just you pulling the bricks out – there’s external forces affecting your structural integrity and there’s other people in your life deconstructing you. Jenga is not a single player game.
They remove some of your bricks and one’s that you don’t want removing. You know the bricks I mean – they take away your self-confidence, your motivation, your courage or even your livelihood. The bastards.
But back to you.
You leave some bricks well alone because you know they are fine just as they are. But you spot the odd brick that looks highly vulnerable so you give it a wiggle. You don’t realise it at the time but it’s going to do a lot of damage. The next thing you know your whole damn tower collapses.
We know what brick that is, it’s the cancer brick and it causes havoc. This insidious brick might look innocent enough and not seem like a threat. But when it’s pulled…..that’s the Twin Tower moment.
So we have to start again. This time, it’s much more difficult. All the other bricks have suffered collateral damage and aren’t so keen to be stacked again. They want out, permanently.
But bricks are tough and you are too so you start the building process again. Life is contagious and it doesn’t feel right to just leave the bricks piled up like that, they look a mess.
You start the self-construction process again. You rebuild and you keep going.
The tower will collapse again at some point so what do we do?
We build again and we keep on building for as many times as it takes. Each time we build the tower it will be different because lessons have been learned.
There’s still plenty to learn too and the trial and error is not over. Restructuring is a never-ending job because Jenga means ‘to build’.
The cancer brick in our Jenga life tower threatens our stability. It makes us realise that perfect symmetry doesn’t exist and life will always be precariously balanced. You don’t win at Jenga but you do have to keep building up.
We’ve all got a Jenga cancer brick but we don’t always pull it out. Sometimes it just stays where it is.