I’m over hacks and 5 min living. Please give me the the depth and deep play
Observing the rapid swimming progress of our 3 year this summer got me thinking about how living life in drips of time is so frustrating
Before we went away for the summer I had been taking Scout swimming twice a week. He was getting really confident and had a good grasp of his body in the water. During these sessions it would mostly be me and him, no major time restraints, no teacher, just us playing around. Water playtime. I got him jumping in, holding his breath and I would always do part of the session without any arm bands on where I would hold him and push him to the side so he could get the feeling of reaching it himself, sparking his determination for more. He was in a good place before we went away and it was the most incredible thing to watch after just 5 days at our first stop, he swam a width of the pool unaided. I was so happy. As the trip went on he just got better and better and swimming became his thing. The confidence and early skills we’d built up together, were now able to flourish with consistent repetition. 8 weeks later we never even thought about taking arm bands to the pool for him and he was able to swim unaided for 15 meters! It was like swimming with a celebrity, everyone in the pool would watch him and ask how old he was!
I’ve thought about this a lot. Many people observe a huge leap in their children’s swimming during a holiday or across a summer. Especially if there are older kids around to observe - playing with older and more able children can really level up a child’s play, I often think about why we segregate by age so much at school, but maybe that’s a post for another day!
Lots of things had lined up to get Scout to his leveled up swim position including, a safe, fun introduction to swimming with a trusted adult (hi), an established habit to get comfortable with the very basics and then crucially the opportunity to focus intensely in putting that into action through consistency and play. This transformation and determined learning is exactly how kids should be going about their lives. Young children have this uncanny ability to focus on learning something with unrivaled determination. If they are self motivated and can get into flow I truly believe they can accomplish things we consistently assume they couldn’t be capable of…if of course they get the chance.
For many of us, life runs with lots of cogs turning. Places to be, timelines to follow, activities and commitments to squeeze in. Life is chopped up into little pieces. We consume information very quickly and in bite sized chunks. Attention has a sharp filter, if it’s not instant, accessible and interesting, forget about it. I think back to when I started my career, to the 100 powerpoint decks we used to create and 2 hour long meetings to deliver them. These days, I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to communicate huge complex pieces of information and insight, not even in 10 slides, but in one sentence. I congratulate myself when I’ve watched a movie undisturbed like I’ve just done an intense buddhist meditation and when I complete a book I look around for someone to present me with a medal. These moments of deep, focussed attention are increasingly precious to me, I crave them and lust after them and when I don’t get them I find myself impatient, frustrated and feeling rudderless.
Technology has made a lot of things easier for us, distilled information is useful. I do prefer this and don’t want to go back to the days of waffley 100 page reports. It’s also crucial in democratising information and making all topics accessible. But that said, I think I’m completely done with living life always in 5 min chunks.
I think about the mothers on the pool side at swimming lessons. Hot, flustered, probably just rushed there to make it on time. Sweating in the heat. Kids hop in and get 20-30mins doing the same boring exercises (I am generalising, I do know there are exceptional swim teachers out there), before rushing out again, that kid not touching a pool for the next week. If we had to design a method for teaching kids to swim, a crucial life skill no less as well as an important way to access a highly beneficial well-being activity, is this honestly how we would design it? Of course not. We would take time out of life to learn it until it’s done, we would allow for a mix of learning the basics and then consistently practising them through play. My utopian dream is an approach where entire terms are focussed on the goal of getting every child to learn to swim, a recognised commitment that every child by age 6 can swim a few meters. Why do we not priortise these kinds of goals for childhood? Why is learning phonics more important than learning to swim? Don’t they both matter? In fact isn’t swimming more important? I’ve never read a story where phonics saved a kids’ life #justsaying
This post wasn’t meant to be a post about learning to swim. I was just so inspired by Scout’s progress through consistent play I felt myself a bit envious. I lusted for that for myself. When I glance online at content aimed at me that’s trying to better my lifestyle everything is a ‘hack’, a ‘5 min change’, a 30 second habit. And I am here for this - seriously, give me the things I can shove in my day that help me stay healthy and sane. But where is the space to recognise a plaster eventually comes unstuck? I think this is perhaps the reason why I took such an unexpected career diversion at a time when the world was falling apart. I saw the pandemic and the addition of child number 3 as the time to go after time. I have personally never been able to achieve day to day work / life balance. It was a goal I was realised a long time a go that was fake news. For me anyway. Because I have a job which is anchored around projects and deadlines and shifting intensities, there is no pattern that I can adjust to daily. I created a term to help me - work, life, play sway - to speak to how I adapt to flow and rhythm that’s coming for me. Sometimes I have control, sometimes I don’t. But what I am thinking about more recently is the time for that deep flow. Days with no meetings and calls. Undisturbed thinking time. Hours to create. I have focussed a lot on making sure I have quality time with the children and enough time to work. But do you know what, I’m a greedy cow when it comes to the richness of life and I find myself in need of making a lot more space for deep flow creative play. Writing here on substack has really opened my eyes to the impact of having this dedicated time to be creative and I realise it’s not a choice, it’s the way my mind is wired, if I do it, I’m a better person, if I don’t I build up frustration.
There are no 5 minute hacks in this post. Just a deep appreciation for the need to get into flow and spend time on personal projects. I am still learning how to balance the work that credits my bank account and the work that credits my soul. I don’t want to grow old regretting I overestimated the need to always reach for one at the expense of the other.
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I feel like all these hacks and productivity stuff are so surface level. Whereas I love to go deep into something for months, reading everything I can about it, doing lots of thinking and reflecting, absorbing what I can!
There seems to be a lot of people who are kinda obsessed with going wider and wider not deeper with life. I'm not saying I think it's wrong because the "width" of *everything* can be incredibly exciting.. anything can be found if we google or stumble around the Internet or even out in real life in towns and cities. There are just so many things!... The width of *everything* can be very fulfilling for some people but to others this seems like a route to overwhelm and stress.. what sounds like bliss to me is having real depth into just a few things