🐥The Paradox of Now #32

WESH

Bonjour Dashing Ducks!

A small nod here to a great man named Tony and his ongoing Duolingo dilemma.

Tony, the only French word you will ever need is ‘wesh’ and I assure you that is the best advice that will come from any past, present or future newsletters.

The last few newsletters have sparked more conversations than usual, and I just want to say thank you to everyone who reads and interacts with myself and Haiku.

I still find it both funny and surreal that people actually read the gump that comes out of my brain, and I couldn’t be more appreciative

In a world where negativity bias is everywhere, it’s good to be reminded that plenty of people are still putting kindness and positivity out there.

Lots of love, people. We’re in this together.

Now let me give you a taste of what's coming:

🐥 Things that may tickle your pickle
🐥 The origin story of Haiku
🐥 A fact about telephone boxes

🥚Eggstra News🥚

Your weekly dose of some fascinating and fun finds:

🦆 Duck Talk – The TED Talk that inspired Haiku’s existence. Yes, really. Quirky, wise, and unexpectedly moving

🥒 Pickleball Welsh Open – Happening right now at Cardiff Met. Come watch this wonderfully chaotic sport in action

📺 PickleB – Pickleball meets entertainment. Go follow if you like fun.

The Paradox of Now

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The Haiku Origin Story

We all love an origin story, don’t we?

And this one, like most, wasn’t planned.

Like with most things in life, nothing is really linear. Ideas and identities form like accidental messes, colliding into each other like a Yu-Gi-Oh! polymerisation card. That is exactly how Haiku came to be.

His story begins in a classroom on the third floor of UWE Business School, Bristol, in 2019. It was my final year and the start of a module called Coaching in Organisations. Our lecturer, Emir, walked in carrying a big box of LEGO.

My eyes lit up.

And I didn’t know it then, but this was going to be one of the most impactful seminars of my life.

This was my first encounter with LEGO Serious Play. The premise was simple: use LEGO to build models that tell stories, unlock metaphors, and approach problems through a different lens.

It was play, but with purpose.

This was right up my street. The seminars weren’t something to endure, they were something I looked forward to and the subsequent essays didn’t feel like essays.

I scored the highest grade in my cohort, not because I was trying to be the best, but because I had found something that made learning feel natural.

Life after university swept me away from the LEGO bricks. I travelled, drifted through jobs I didn’t enjoy, and eventually found myself at Cardiff University. But before my university roles, every day felt like waking up and stepping on LEGO. Painful, sharp, and easily avoidable if I took a moment to open my eyes to the world.

I moved into the Start-Up and Enterprise team, where I currently workshops and hackathons along with many other things.

That spark returned. I remembered how those LEGO sessions had opened people up in ways nothing else could.

I had watched fellow students reveal truths in plastic bricks that they would never have said out loud during my time at university.

So I knew I had to introduce it to this one.

I went online and bought my own official LEGO Serious Play set and ten LEGO ducks.

Why ducks?

They were not part of my original introduction to these methods, but I had seen a TED Talk where a facilitator used them.

Six small pieces. Just under one billion combinations.

A duck, but never the same duck twice. That idea fascinated me.

Those ducks became the beginning of something bigger. I ran practice sessions with my manager and my team. They laughed, they played, they saw it too.

Fast forward a few months and our Enterprise team had invested in ten LEGO Serious Play kits and around thirty ducks.

The ducks have since bred (as ducks do) and now I am the proud father of sixty LEGO ducks at work.

But the body of Haiku was only half the story. He still needed a name.

I’ve always loved words. When I journalled, I used to write a small section at the beginning called storytime.

The exercise was simple: take one moment from the day, however small, and write it down as though it could become a story. Doing this opens your eyes. You start to realise that even the slowest, most ordinary day is full of moments you could expand into something bigger.

A tiny detail becomes a doorway.

It is one of the best exercises I have ever done for noticing life.

From there, I started writing haikus to tell the story. Seventeen syllables, three lines, a snapshot of feeling. It became a daily prompt, not to capture what happened but how I felt.

A haiku is not complete until the reader brings themselves into it, and I have always loved that. Eastern poetry and philosophy often leave more unsaid than said, and that is where the beauty lies.

A lesson for Western society perhaps?

So when it came time to name my little LEGO duck, the answer was already there.

Haiku.

And here we are. Haiku has been with me ever since. He turns up in photos, in workshops, in stories and now takes pride of place in this newsletter.

He is part mascot, part mirror, part reminder that play has a serious place in our lives.

The message in all this?

Things rarely unfold in a straight line. Haiku was never the plan.

He was the messy result of years of small choices, forgotten passions, random jobs, and strange obsessions colliding together.

That is how most of life works. We do not always see where the pieces will fit, but they often do in hindsight.

I know I will never be able to create all 915,103,765 approximate possible versions of Haiku. Just as I will never write every haiku that could exist.

But that is a good thing.

I am ok with an unfinished project.

Because that is what I will remain until my very last breath.

🐥 Haiku’s Haiku 🐥

Funny how I took this photo a month ago with no idea if it would ever be relevant.

Turns out I’m living proof of what I was just talking about.

One small decision to look under the magnifying glass and suddenly Haiku is the star of the show.

Now it fits perfectly with the story arc.

Cheers, past Scott.

🌴 Palm Tree Euphoria 🌴

Preston has the longest row of telephone boxes in the UK.

FACTS.

See you next week Dashing Ducks! 🐥

P.S. if this fact about Preston’s mighty line of phone boxes rang a bell for you, forward it to a fellow duckling who loves useless trivia as much as we do.

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