Scree – Page 101 – Craig Constantine

Play with Kel Glaister →

Published August 4, 2022 · All posts on Aug 4 · Movers Mindset

Play with Kel Glaister

How does play and movement intersect with personal growth, mental health, and the practice of Parkour?

Exploring how Parkour connects to mental health and play reveals deep personal insights.

It’s all about play. And I think that making— I love strengthening and I love building— you know, physical capacity. But in the end, that’s just a couple of stepping stones towards building people’s ability to play.
~ Kel Glaister (6:46)

The discussion opens with reflections on the influence of animals, like Kel’s dog, on humility and how they bring perspective to human movement practice. The conversation then expands to explore the cultural and environmental factors shaping Parkour, emphasizing the unique styles and strengths fostered by different regions. There’s an emphasis on how community and environmental context influence the practice.

Kel shares personal insights about the role of play in movement and the transition from self-critical motivations to a more compassionate approach. Craig and Kel discuss the impact of mental health struggles and how this shaped their training philosophy, shifting focus toward longevity and joy in movement. The role of organizations like Parkour Earth is also examined, highlighting the importance of global representation and grassroots involvement in shaping the future of the discipline.

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Rules for living →

Published August 4, 2022 · All posts on Aug 4 · Self-improvement, 7 for Sunday

Stoicism, in theory, is a philosophy. As a practice, it is a set of rules to live by. The Stoics believed that life was complicated—more importantly, that it was exhausting. So to create rules was to help ensure that we stay on the right path, that we don’t let the complexity and the nuance of each individual scenario allow us to compromise on the big, high standards we know we hold.
~ Ryan Holiday from, 12 (Stoic) Rules For Life: An Ancient Guide to the Good Life

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This is an enormous post. Normally something of this size would be twelve, separate posts. It’s nice to be able to leisurely read through this. I’ve gotten enormous return on my investment of time from these rules. I often remind myself, however, that these are aspirational. These are the ideals for which I’m striving. They are not the reef upon which I’m planning on smashing the ship through strict adherence.

Coaching through play →

Published August 3, 2022 · All posts on Aug 3 · Parkour

This blog deals specifically with the games based aspect of coaching. I recommend using a model of explicitly teaching skills and then combining this with purposeful practice drills. With primary school children, that almost invariably means playing games.
~ John ‘Hedge’ Hall from, Coaching through Play: How Does it Work? | LinkedIn

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I often mention parkour, FreeRunning, and Art du Déplacement and I just wanted to take a moment to mention that there are a ton of people (myself not included) who take teaching it very seriously. If you’ve ever wondered how it’s taught— well, here you go.

Preparation with Catherine Jaeger →

Published August 2, 2022 · All posts on Aug 2

What are the challenges and strategies for transitioning a podcast to include a co-host while maintaining quality and authenticity?

A podcaster shares insights on balancing spontaneity with preparation.

You know, the magic [is] in the bottle as some jazz musicians say, right? Getting that group together, so that you can really have that spark and both drive the conversation forward.
~ Catherine Jaeger (11:40)

The conversation focuses on a podcaster transitioning to a co-hosted format. Topics include the challenges of adapting to a new medium, the steep learning curve of conducting engaging interviews, and the importance of pre-planning versus spontaneity in creating authentic content. Catherine reflects on their journey of podcasting, emphasizing the significance of balancing preparation and minimal editing to capture the essence of conversations.

Additionally, the discussion explores time constraints and their impact on the podcast format, highlighting the benefits of short, focused episodes for both creators and listeners. Other themes include building rapport with co-hosts, managing roles during conversations, and learning from various interviewing styles. Catherine also acknowledges the role of improvisation and intentional experimentation in evolving their craft.

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You’ll know it when you experience it →

Published August 2, 2022 · All posts on Aug 2

Yet while the application and discussion of burnout has greatly expanded, what burnout is, exactly, and what causes it has remained stubbornly difficult to pin down. There is no clinical definition of burnout, no universally agreed upon yardstick for what constitutes it, no official diagnostic checklist as to its symptoms.
~ Brett McKay, from A Counterintuitive Cure for Burnout

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McKay draws our attention to a feature of burnout that spans all the various types of people, epochs, living situations, employment and work where we see burnout: Sameness. Monotony. Repetition without variety. This is clearly a feature of what causes me to burnout. I don’t think it’s sufficient to cause me to burnout, but it’s definitely necessary.

If I can change this feature, for whatever-it-is that I’m approaching burnout with, I can avert the catastrophe. When burnout approaches, I’ve tried planning, thinking that wrangling with the process to reduce the cognitive load might help. I’ve thought that better planning—break this huge long thing into manageable steps—would give me space and energy to recharge. But this never works. The long slog which I can clearly see, after I do a bunch of planning, simply makes the onset of burnout accelerate.

Instead, if I figure out how to bring novelty into the mix, that seems to always work. (I say “seems” because, although I cannot think of case where it did not work, I’m a pragmatist.) Often this works if I simply find the aspect of whatever-it-is which represents the biggest amount of work, and delete that. Whatever-it-is was going to slump to non-existence anyway, when I burnout, so I may as well cut to the chase. I find that having stripped away something that I thought was essential, whatever-it-was turns out to contain a little nugget of, “hunh, that’s interesting.”

May break the Internet →

Published August 1, 2022 · All posts on Aug 1 · Internet Tech

If Earth were to shift to even longer days, we may need to incorporate a “negative leap second”—this would be unprecedented, and may break the internet.
~ Matt King and Christopher Watson from, The length of Earth’s days has been mysteriously increasing, and scientists don’t know why

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The use of the phrase “may break the internet” made me smile. It’s not irony, and it’s serious. I do not want to think about what would happen if they inserted a negative leap second; The forward sort are bad enough, and don’t get me started on Daylight Savings Time. I digress.

This is a refreshingly clear, popular-science level article that covers the myriad reasons there is such variability in the exact amount of time it takes our magic marble to whirl precisely once around its axis. The very first thing most people never think of is how do we even precisely decide what “one rotation” is. (Hint: Astronomy.)

Saeculum →

Published July 31, 2022 · All posts on Jul 31

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.
~ Rebecca Solnit from, Rebecca Solnit on Trees and the Shape of Time – The Marginalian

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Trees are simply magical. Carl Sagan made a point in the original Cosmos series that everything uses the same basic machinery to read, and write using the same four “letters” of DNA. In a very real sense, trees are us with some different initial inputs. (Setting aside the more ephemeral, yet critical ways where we differ starkly from trees, like degree of consciousness, self-awareness, spirit, soul?) Stand next to an old enough tree and one is invariably transported to a higher level of thinking about being.

R e p e t i t i o n →

Published July 30, 2022 · All posts on Jul 30

The popular history of spaced repetition is full of myths and falsehoods. This text is to tell you the true story. The problem with spaced repetition is that it became too popular for its own effective replication. Like a fast mutating virus it keeps jumping from application to application, and tells its own story while accumulating errors on the way.
~ Piotr Wozniak from, The true history of spaced repetition – SuperMemo

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If you’ve never heard of Super Memo, and you click over there, it’s likely to distract you for an hour. This article is both the origin story for Super Memo and for spaced repetition. I’ve read at least one other thing (I’ve not read this article in full, but I have read at least one other one), that is a comprehensive deep dive. Today, I’m sharing this in the hopes that you’ll glance over at it, skim around and realize that, since you will then be acquainted with Wozniak, I am not the most systems-crazy person you know of.

I’m not being hyperbolic →

Published July 29, 2022 · All posts on Jul 29

Why is it so difficult to make choices that we know will be best for us in the long run?
~ Peter Attia from, Hyperbolic discounting: friend and foe of goal achievement – Peter Attia

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Sorry for the titular word play. This should be read foremost to understand exponential versus hyperbolic decay, and then to understand how to get your future self to do what your current self wishes. Attia explains it in the context of imagining future rewards. It turns out that using one (to assess the value of future rewards) makes actual sense, and the other turns out to be how our brains work (because: survival drove evolution).

Snoring? No really, go read it. Because if you understand the two methods you can hack yourself by setting up your goals to play into your mind’s predilection to make the wrong value calculation. In effect, rather than set things up the way that makes sense which frequently leads to failure thanks to our brains, we set things up in a more complicated way to fake ourselves into getting where we want to go.

Challenge with Seth Ruji →

Published July 28, 2022 · All posts on Jul 28 · Movers Mindset

Challenge with Seth Ruji

What drives personal growth and the mindset necessary to embrace challenges in physical and mental practices?

A journey of self-improvement unfolds through insights on goal-setting, risk assessment, and personal evolution.

Through parkour, I’ve been able to open up my perspective on life a ton and it’s created so many different opportunities.
~ Seth Ruji (20:04)

The conversation centers on personal growth, emphasizing mental and physical discipline. Topics include the importance of structured training plans, the mindset needed to assess and embrace risks, and the influence of high-stakes challenges on personal development. Seth highlights how parkour fosters self-awareness, teaching individuals to recognize his limits and set realistic, achievable goals.

The discussion also explores broader life themes, such as balancing professional ambitions with personal well-being, maintaining discipline amidst challenges, and the joy of continuous improvement. Insights are drawn from parkour and professional experiences, underscoring the interplay between mental resilience and physical achievement.

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