'Make the world a playground.'
Skate park School
Lesson 02 : ‘Make the world a playground’
As Shakespeare once famously wrote : “All the world’s a stage.” Still love that. But bicycles and skateboards weren’t around yet, so I’d like to add something to that.
All the world can also be a playground.
Again, in terms of skating itself, it would take an average 10-year old, picking up a skateboard for the first time, around fifteen minutes to eclipse the skills I have learned over a couple decades. My skating ability is roughly comparable to my opera-singing ability, which is to say this: I still try doing both on occasion.
The point is, a skate park is a symbol for liberation, independence, and freedom that comes from having imagination and the willingness to play without an instruction manual. Of course there are plenty of other symbols I could use as well, like a soccer field, or a giant white-walled room with a bucket of paint, or a deep dark mysterious forest waiting to be explored…but since I’m calling this ‘Skate Park School,’ I’m gonna stick with it. A lot of times the skate park is a first stop, or middle stop, or last stop in a triad of activities. These usually consist of:
A skate park
A library
A hike near a body of water that bounded by a mysterious, deep, dark forest.
A skate park is less of a puzzle and more of a game. You don’t necessarily do thing until you’re one. You do something, and you try out something, and then maybe you hop off your bike or skateboard or scooter and look for ladybugs, or chase your brother around, or just go off behind a giant ledge where you can have a few minutes of solitude to yourself.
There’s a growing amount of attention being focused on The Attention Economy, and the growing deficit. I love this conversation, because I feel strongly that one of the defining traits of those successful (at what’s important to them) in this generation will be an ability and willingness to focus, to hone in, and to give attention to a task or challenge.
The seeming-paradox is that it’s so important to simply play.
To be honest, you don’t really need a wheeled device at the skate park. It’s forms of concrete that (like grass or deep dark mysterious forests) offer endless varieties of play.
How many types of physical play are better, as a kid, than running? The thrill of a chase, the exhilaration of running up a ramp, the joy of bouncing in circles around barricades with your brother.
Do you need a skate park to do those things? No. But the point is that skate parks are a place to kinetically imagine and improvise, a place to move and play and make your own instruction manual.
When you have a place to free-play, to open-play, to play with abandon and free spirits, then you develop the ability to take that mindset to anywhere.
It means that you take that ability to play, to think and improvise and create and imagine, it means you develop the ability to take that mindset anywhere.
Which means you reduce your ability of being stricken with the deadly diseases of boredom and malaise that can become epidemic if not dealt with early.
It means you make a playground wherever you go.
It means you create wherever you go, with the materials you have.
It means you remember the power you have to make up games and to imagine fresh ideas for new spaces and new objects.
When you can make a playground anywhere, it means you can play anywhere.
When you can play anywhere, it means your life will be filled with more joy and meaning and comradery.
When your life is filled with more joy and more meaning and more comradery, chances are you will be more successful at relationships and at other things important to you.
And when your mind and body have the ability to roam freely and explore…chances are it’s gonna help at the other extreme:
focusing and giving attention and finding ways of making your work successful and meaningful.
So get good at playing.
Get good at finding skateparks and making playgrounds.
Find goodness wherever you are.
There are many, many places to find goodness, and to bring goodness. At a skate park, in the wild, and everywhere in between.
Two young boys lie on their stomachs next to a river and look for water skippers and other creatures
There are many, many places to find goodness, and to bring goodness. At a skate park, in the wild, and everywhere in between.
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More posts below about learning, schooling, and the infinite pursuit of imagination
