Peter Gray, psychologist and author, describes in his 2014 TED talk how animals who have been prevented from playing during early development become socially and emotionally crippled.
“Organizers of public play events of magnitude tend to forget that what they are doing is so radical, so fraught with political significance. Should they remember, they just might be able to appreciate how far their events reach beyond the fun they create. It’s fun, all right. New games. Old games. But it’s more than all that. It’s a social movement.” – Bernard DeKoven
Play is Powerful! Bridging Loneliness Through Active Intergenerational Communities→
Why is #play powerful? Because it can connect people through time and across generations. A kid and a senior can share a memory over a streetgame played in youth and for a moment connect as humans, glimpse into a possible future and the forgotten past.
Intergenerational community is rare but incredibly powerful when it comes to creating possibilities, vision, health, hope, and joy.
Parkour is one of those unique spaces that can truly support intergen community. I look forward to the next 10, 20, 50+ years of movement and play in my life, and to be able to both watch and be apart of helping guide culture as our diverse leaders age up and new ones emerge. I am so inspired by Julie Angel s messaging around positive aging, the parkour over 40 fb group, the growth of PKMove / playful aging / Forever Young programs (including one we are doing with PKV in 2019) and the numerous practitioners (some who became best friends, my mentors, My students) I’ve met over the years through events and practice.
And mostly I am so so grateful to be apart of a sport / discipline / community that I can be apart of no matter how old I get, no matter how my body changes, no matter the place I am, no matter the money I make, no matter obstacles I face. There are so very few legitimate, meaningful communities and outlets like that in life–spaces without limitations or rules around participation.
It truly inspires me to ask more of my self, my body, my practice, my city, and my life, because I see others, older and younger, doing the same. And as a person, I more deeply understand my value as a human in this larger ecosystem–as a student/teacher, as a learner/leader–evolving, maturing, transforming.
We are neither young or old, we are human! Let’s play together.
“I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” – Adrienne Rich
M: On Fear of Suffering, Avoiding Risk, Losing Joy→
“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home… Fulfillment… is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal… It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell… The thing about working with time, instead of against it, …is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”
– Ursula Le Guin
Reflection:
I see so many people (myself included!) avoid and run away from opportunities for joy due to fear of suffering, pain, and failure. Who and what are you turning away from in your life? What are you losing by saying no to those opportunities?
Life is not as certain as you think. So many of us operate on 2, 5, 10 year plans, when tomorrow it could all radically change. I think we need to ask ourselves more often–is it worth the risk to be patient, to feel secure, to feel ‘ready’ before we take a leap? There will always be another excuse, more growth we need to do, but there is only one today. And people, opportunities, can disappear as fast as they appear.
Friendship, Vulnerability, Asking For Help, and West Wing→
A man was walking down a street when he fell into a hole and the walls were so steep he couldn’t get out. So the man in the hole began to cry out for help.
A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on
Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole.
Our guy, aghast, says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ but his friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before… and I know the way out.’
Right now, all of us are in one of two places: We are either stuck in a hole… or we’re walking along the street, able to see these holes all around, able to hear those calling out.
For those of you stuck, maybe you are too afraid to ask for help, or ashamed. Maybe you don’t realize you’re stuck or you convinced yourself its not that bad. Or maybe you have so many prescriptions and prayers piled up at your feet that you’ve all but given up hope of getting out.
Hold on. Keep going. There are those out there who will stop and help. And sometimes even the earth itself shifts and changes the landscape.
And for those of you walking on the street, I know its easier to throw prayers and prescriptions–likes, comments, critiques, judgments. It’s easier to keep walking along, minding your own business, taking care of yourself and yours.And that to jump down and help someone out, to make yourself vulnerable again, to give your most valuable resources of time, energy, and love to someone, can be scary–it might backfire, it might be difficult.
Be brave. Reach down. Jump in.
You don’t have to jump into every hole. That would be foolish, because you don’t know the way out of every hole. But you’ll know which ones are familiar, and which ones aren’t. Pick the ones you know.
If you want meaningful community and deeper friendship, you must also be willing to show up where you can. You must be willing to look up from your phone, move beyond your apathy or fear, and jump in.
The Overprotected Kid and Barriers to Play
Recently the Atlantic there was an article released on
“One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower.
When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think. For example, parents now routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago.”
⭐Maybe the real question is, how did these fears come to have such a hold over us? And what have our children lost—and gained—as we’ve succumbed to them?⭐
M: On Living in the Moment→
When ‘living in the moment,’ you are only capable of thinking about one person–yourself. Considering the impact of your actions on the world around you and those within it is an act of looking into the future and reaching into the past in order to give yourself the best chance of creating an outcome that is in alignment with your standards of being.
2018.11.15
M: On Peacemaking→
“Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?” – Kahlil Gibran
The peacemaker in my soul is paces in the backroom, tirelessly at work and often met with failure. To negotiate between logic and love; to choose with wisdom and also clarity.
It is not easy.
” Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. “