Move More .

Did you know you can’t go in playgrounds in nyc if you’re older than twelve? Meanwhile 70% of children drop out of sports by the time they are 13, citing that it is no longer fun. What is our city accidentally telling young people with that playground policy? What if there was a way to turn regular city infrastructure, handrails, curbs, benches, into a playground. Into a more playful way of seeing the world. When we think about a playground not as some frivolous zone to move out of and grow up but as a space that’s designed to meet the needs of moving in different ways, safely exploring risk, encouraging creativity and collaboration, we know in our bones those are things that will remain important for the rest of our lives.

What if we could create a space where we could explore confidence as a skill? A place where knowing what you can and can’t do becomes a way to notice yourself getting stronger and making better decisions? A place where reflecting on your experience is encouraged. Where saying yes or no is celebrated equally, your autonomy paramount in your decisions. There is always another day but you only have one body.


Parkour looks dangerous. And it can be. We are playing with real world consequences. Concrete and metal. Trained well, it becomes a way to navigate those consequences, create better, safer outcomes for failure, it creates alternative paths to success. Many of us have a special room in the apartment for the knives and the fire. It’s called the kitchen and the skills we learn there about how to be safe in a dangerous environment are crucial for staying healthy and living a rich life.

Maybe there can be a space in our lives for concrete and metal and wood.

Just like knives and fire, Movement can be dangerous. The environment can react unpredictably. Rarely are you doing an activity that acknowledges that and gives you a chance to decide where and how you move as you do it. At its simplest parkour has removed the variables of urgency, other players, untested environments. It becomes a perfect landscape for the science of self, small personal experiments in risk. Smaller than you think. Maybe it’s the fear of bumping your shin, or of being embarrassed for messing up, or the fear losing your focus. Those become opportunities and space to notice a loss of balance, a feeling of peer pressure, or an attitude that isn’t helpful.

Navigating risk in the sense of a movement that you decide whether or not to do, in the face of small consequences in a supportive group. Risk in that place becomes an experimental landscape for you to know yourself better. For you to keep finding safer ways to test your limits.


The practice of parkour can appear reckless but that breaks down in the long term version. Parkour, long term, asks if you want to do this thing tomorrow, what would you do today. What if we could meet a feeling of urgency with patience, a compulsive need to move met with a measured response, a fear of looking bad with a well practiced self knowing. And there’s always a way. Some incremental step.

It’s yours to find.