For the past year or so I’ve been exploring balances in life. Everyone talks about balancing Work and Life and I’ve obviously been working on that since being a father. I felt though that I was being a bit too boxy about this. I can’t describe it better than that, but it seemed like if I wasn’t working, I’d be concentrating on family. There also seemed to be other things missing a bit. At first I thought this was Play. And to some extent it is.
What do I mean by Play? It’s actually not about playing games or running about although those things are good and I sort of put them in the Life box. It’s more about being playful in making things and thinking differently. It’s hard to describe. Part of this desire was fulfilled by making QNTMFSLC, David’s and my Bond game on Twitter for Hide and Seek. I’d done a few things with Twitter before, but doing this allowed me to think about it narratively and think about it from a “sending people into the world” perspective, where they could be sensors. Another part of play was running And I Saw again at the Hide and Seek Weekender. These things felt “Worky” in a way but actually allowed me to play in code and think about things like real time activity streams and to code up some prototype things. Loosening my mind from the quasi-straight line of work and allowing it to wander in play and find interesting paths. It was really joyous to see people’s spots in the game appear in real time on a big screen; it’s simple code but it had a feeling of magic as moments ago someone had texted in a simple code and now they were there in a continuously refreshing river of data as a player in a game.
Play is so important for learning and development when we’re children but then it gets lost when we become adults and I’m trying to carve out playtime with new APIs, new bits of code and new bits of tech. Hackdays help, but directed but not prescriptive play is where it’s at.
What I think also gets lost in adulthood, especially in today’s potentially “always on” society is the notion of being. I realized that I rarely just am. I rarely have time when my mind is not in one of the boxes, thinking of either past, present or future. The presence of “always on” networks and portable pervasive devices make time to just “Be” an endangered sensation. And this was something that I wanted to explore during my holiday. A lovely gift from my wife was a long weekend away to go walking in Austria. What I wanted more than anything was to enjoy just being in the moment. Solitude and disconnection was, for me, something to crave, and I learned how to just “Be” again.
There has been a lot of talk of late about how to live in times of the new paradigm of flow (Kevin Marks, Stowe Boyd and Howard Rheingold). A lot of what resonated with me was about how to let go of conversations which had “flowed past”. It seemed to be something that was preventing “Being” for me. Interestingly this is because in a way I enjoy being in or seeing conversations with people like Kevin, Stowe and Josh Porter who are in the US and these conversations happen at times when I should be in the Life/Be box. Taking some time away from the stream and actually not worrying about what I was missing, but just dipping in occasionally and being in the moment was so interesting, and was just the release I was looking for. But I think I needed to have a break, and I saw it very much as a break with gorgeous scenery, enjoying a different pace of life where doing something very primal such as going for a walk was part of the process of learning to “Be”.
I now find that I have a Work/Life/Play/Be balance. I know when it’s not there because I’ve experienced the “being” part again, I can remember it and have learnt to just dip into the flow. I’ve also learned that what I miss in my life balance is more than what I miss in the flow. Both are still there and need to be there and I want them both there. I guess we’re all learning how to live in a world where we’re evolving new approaches and behaviours exceptionally fast. Sometimes a full stop into reflection is the only way to understand the values of these behaviours.
