Yo!
So last week I watched the sports documentary, In search of Greatness. (http://www.
It details the lives of super athletes like Wayne Gretzky, and takes a look under the hood to see the component parts responsible for making up performance excellence.
Something that caught my attention is that each athlete pointed to a time in their childhood of unrestricted, unstructured play.
The Documentary goes on to site some research detailing how we often get the fundamental equation of exceptional learning performance wrong these days.
We put kids into structured regimens to try to get them to be great, and often end up with another brick in the wall…
Whereas the kids who get a foundational developmental arena of PLAY, and then supportive scaffolding that flows with their innate interests…Inevitably grow up into the GOATS (greatest of all time.)
Ironic, huh? One of those laughing because its tragically true kind of moments.
As the old saying goes…The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Because, It doesn’t matter how “helpful” we are trying to be…the wrong approach is the wrong approach, is the wrong approach. Teacher… Leave them kids alone!
So, I think it stands to reason we need a humility and vigilance to carefully evaluate our methodologies when engaged in the art of shaping ourselves and each other.
Because true greatness doesn’t emerge from rigid regimens and contrived effort, but rather…
Flourishes in the spirit of self-discovery where learning happen organically, implicitly and joyfully.
Where mistakes give way to inner resolve,
And the journey of life takes shape from appreciating unique contexts.
Yep, Pretty much the Visionary Cartography ethos in a nutshell.
So, to wrap things up here, lets take a dive into some deep cosmological waters, and leave you with a nut worth cracking.
Alan watts is getting his street cred these days. The whole documentary was peppered with Alans genius.
This particular quote caught my eye,
“All inventive and creative people, they’re not hung up on fixed definitions of what any form of life or reality might be.”
I’m all about the constructionism learning theory these days… or as a parallel what Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan points to as Self-Authorship.
So I want to leave you with a Koan (An Evolutionary Puzzle) today that might just help you disentagle some BS (Belief systems) causing interference…
A Koan that might just get you prioritizing more time with your inner kiddos craving to ask unfiltered questions entangled with all sorts of potential adventures ….
A Koan that might get you to turn off whatever noise is vying for your attention and inspire you to double down on the inner music…
A Koan that might bring you back to the spirit of play, and an appreciation of the unique idiosyncratic developmental scaffolding that actually work for you… (You know what I’m talking about… right!?)
And perhaps most importantly, a Koan that might get you put up a solid middle finger to all the teachers out there dishing out bad advice like its good for you… (We don’t need no thought control)
And the Koan is this:
Surrounded by confines of logic, Amidst patterns of associative predictability… Where is the song of play heard?
If the Song of Play is heard, but not danced…Are you really hearing it?
To your Better day,
~DHR