Life is about participation, take a lead from these teenagers…
We talk a lot about movement mavericks here at Earth Strength and I love watching what this growing community is doing. However some things move me more than others and I was particularly inspired by this video, created by some friends in Quebec:
I wish that this was the normal way that we could view teenagers. However the quote below seems to sum up our societies attitude to them:
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
I am sure that many of the more sensational newspapers and politicians would agree with this statement. However it wasn’t written by a contemporary journalist or a politician. It is in fact attributed to Socrates and is at least 2,400 years old. What this does for me is to point up how many of the problems we attribute to teenagers are more about our adult disconnect from them, rather than anything to do with the teenagers themselves. Put more simply, we don’t get teenagers.
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still filled with the optimism of the art of the possible.
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But we should. In my experience of working with them I have found that at this age of transition they are wise, generous, caring, passionate and most of all still filled with the optimism of the art of the possible. Sadly this generosity of spirit is often crushed under the heel of adult conformity.
This is why I love this video, here are a group of friends who have gone out and just created something beautiful. Using nothing more than some big rocks and nature, they have created their own outdoor playground. The simple joy of their free being comes across in this video clip.
That joy and spontaneity has touched the hearts of some of the foremost thinkers of modern movement and practitioners of Parkour. People like Rafe Kelly of Parkour Visions and Dr Kwame M Brown of Move Theory and the FUNction Community.
In this case though, these boys; Sol, Eliot, Nathan and Antoine have inspired me to share what they did with a much wider community and to use this video to show to adults just what teenagers are capable of given a chance.
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the embodiment of movement mavericks.
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What they have done – with no coaching – fits perfectly into what we do at Earth Strength. They used nature to find ways of moving with ease and imagination. They played, they learnt, they adapted and they shared. These are true life skills that they are gaining and maybe we are seeing here the next generation of Earth Strength or Parkour coaches.
Whichever way these four young men are the embodiment of movement mavericks.
Props to them all…
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