Spelenderwijs

As close to a travel blog as I will write

I like to think of the way we travel through the world as curious orbits. We gravitate towards, around and away from people at different points in our lives. Sometimes, it is this momentum, circling around someone and then shooting off into the distance that helps us find new horizons, ones we could not see from our previous orbit. Other times, we feel stuck, going in circles in a space that we do not want to stay in, and wonder if we will ever break free.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I have used orbits to describe our interactions as sport coaches with athletes a few times now, with the power to completely disrupt the gravity of someone else’s experience of the galaxy. It is so easy to disrupt someone’s orbit; most of the time, we don’t even notice we are doing it. This isn’t always a bad thing, I’ve spend the last few weeks watching my friends orbit me. A foreigner, a new asteroid that has been pulled towards their world, one that reluctantly leaves after only a few days even though I could spend a lifetime there. I’d like to think I’m never really gone though, like stardust. There are parts of me that will still orbit those cities, those spaces, those bars and dinner tables and metro train window seats long after I have left.

Even more so, the impact we have on other people is impossible to predict. I was lucky enough to engage in a few talks while I was travelling, and besides being told to slow down and speak in small sentences, I really loved wandering through the topics. On one side, I fumbled through “finding our way” in talent development and coach education. Using a forest theme, I had the joy of revisiting my early work around talent pathways (and how terrible they’ve been), a new thread that I never would have found a voice for without the amazing authorship of our Beyond the field of play paper, and finally my most recent thread around Coach education as leading out with an experienced other.

I know that these threads are inherently connected, but it was so refreshing to see their interplay unfold in the form of something rigid and static like a slide deck. I’d like to think I’m pretty good at bringing these moments to life, even if the secondary information feels a million miles away from where the action is really happening, but I wasn’t expecting to hear that my storytelling sounds like music. Metaphors and imagery have always come so easily to me, so during the talk I fell back into my cabin in the woods metaphor and this seemed to ring true. Lately I’ve been going one step further with the story, especially when talking to movement and physical therapy practitioners about how we live in the cabin.

It’s not just that people feel more comfortable and safe inside, they are now tucking themselves into bed and not leaving. We may be outside, tapping on the windows, comfortable in our outdoor lifestyle and the wisdom of not knowing that comes with that, but forcing them to leave would be just as counterintuitive as providing a movement solution to help solve their movement problem. And that safety, the self-defence mechanism can look so different. It looks like taking the easy way out, letting our self care slip, forgetting our hobbies, coming to the gym but sulking the whole time, letting work boil over into our personal time, not eating well - I could go on.

The best part about these threads is that I always start them consistently: by reminding everyone that I am not an expert. This is quite easy to do, with my age kinda giving that away, or at least making people question it earlier on than they would for others. But I don’t do it to justify myself, I do it for the breath of relief I sometimes hear when I say it. ‘Oh, thank goodness this person isn’t about to just try and shove an hour’s worth of knowledge down my throat’ - whatever use that is. My second talk was actually the first time I had been back in a university classroom with live students, and I may have lied about being not at all nervous.

I’m the kind of person who sits down to talk, usually on desks or the floor rather than chairs, but this time there was a perfect little stage to sit down on. This left me just a little bit higher than the rest of the class, and gave full view of my totally recycled slides. I was brought in to “give a talk” I guess, but I actually just asked a question instead. The same question I’ve pondered here before: what needs to be real?

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The context this time was within physical therapy, something that I cannot even pretend to be an expert about, so I had a lot of fun genuinely exploring this question. I was blown away by their responsiveness, the pause that had just as much to do with the language barrier as their pondering of the question.

There was a tangible moment when the room flipped, and I knew we had stumbled upon something special. I started repeating questions to help build out my mindmap of the event, and they started to laugh a little at the rhythm. Then, the tables turned and more questions emerged. A question to answer a question. A misplaced apology for getting too philosophical, even though that’s exactly what we wanted. I had no idea how long we were talking for, but I wrote so many notes that it took me a few hours to draw the map. You can find it below:

One thing that became undeniable during this adventure was language. And not just in the way you’re thinking. You’re right, there were many times where I was sitting down somewhere and watching people talk all around me and not having a single idea about what they were saying. We grew up around a second language but that constant exposure meant that I can translate what I hear almost immediately in that context. But I don’t mind not knowing, if anything, I tried to attune to other elements of language like pace, tone of voice, body language and allll of the hand gestures.

The one thing that would kill me is when people would apologise for speaking their own language in front of me. What a world we live in. Where space dust like me can float into a space, and commandeer it unintentionally with my inability to communicate. I didn’t want to make everyone tip-toe around me, to always switch back into a place of discomfort to make me feel comfortable, but their kind hearts made it difficult for them to stop. I just needed them to know that it is not an expectation, and I think that sentiment alone was appreciated.

It’s not all rainbows though, because the language barrier really did get in the way. Our deep conversations about the technicalities of our worlds and worldviews were easily maintained in English, but I knew immediately that I was only getting 1% of the rich knowledge from the person sitting beside me. It made me yearn for the multiverse, for a version where I could have been Italian, or Dutch, or both. Not just to be able to say the words, but to really know what they mean. To feel them in my bones, like I can hear their words as they reverberate over mine. I could have easily sat there for hours, not understanding a word, and watched my friends teach or coach or work with patients, in pure awe.

In a way, I did learn some of the language… I got very used to hearing the same phrase, every few sentences:

Hoe zeg je dit in het Engles?

Come si chiama?

Como se cheama?

Can you guess what it says?

Literally, these lines mean something different, but they all emerged when trying to “find the word in English” so I could understand. It ranges from quite literally, ‘how do I say this in English’ to ’what is it called’, but the message is the same. There are pieces of the world, theories we share, threads we weave but not fully formed, never 100%, because we can’t find the words in English. Robin Wall Kimmerer captures this perfectly in their book, Braiding Sweetgrass:

The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It’s too beautiful for English to explain.

I wanted to share a word that I learnt recently, but refuse to attempt to pronounce for fear of butchering it (more on that some other time).

Spelenderwijs.  

It was written all over the physical therapy clinic I visited, which suggested that it was genuine, baked into the foundation of everything they do. It translates to ‘playfully’ in English, and I knew there was a reason that I was drawn to that word immediately. I know a direct translation is never quite right, it feels like a shadow of a word. But I did love the way it felt, how it sounded, what it looked like when I wandered through the gym and found people trying it out.

I would like to think that I approach everything spelenderwijs. Even when I was walking through towns that I can barely remember the names for but fell in love with either way, I am the person who will jump up and over rocks and tree stumps and follow paths through the dust in the grass just because other people have walked them before me. I duck and weave through the world, I often sneak in a hip and shoulder bump on my friends when they say something silly and deserving of missing their next step. Even in the gym, everyone kept looking for the one handball that always went missing because I would fidget with it constantly - a toy that I never have access to at home.

I think it makes the world a more interesting place, and it definitely reconnects me to movement in a way that never feels like work. I now have a word for that experience that feels a lot stronger than just ‘playful’. It is embedded in my new memories, in the moments that I was playful in so many ways that I had almost forgotten about. My cheeks still hurt from laughing and smiling so much, I left a trail of breadcrumbs as sticky notes and Polaroids.

I don’t think I hid my tears well on the plane, I talk even more with my hands now, and I have music albums that I can put on specifically to feel closer to my new/old friends. And when I listen to those words, when I wander through the topics we chewed over for hours together, when I open the cover of the newest book in my collection to read the inscription (and not much else, because I can’t read Dutch yet but one day I will), I will feel the gravity of that orbit again. Tethered in some ways but more untethered in others. Here, but not here.

It has been fascinating seeing how language mediates our interactions with the world. There is so much of the world we have taken for granted in just English alone. I love that my attention is shifting here, opening me up to the world in a new way, reminding me that there is a richness that we have been inattentionally blind to, and it is our responsibility, each in our own little corners of the world, to do better. To be better. To move through the chaos and find clarity, rather than trying to ignore its existence.

This is just a snapshot of my thoughts on this topic, we recorded a whole podcast episode about it, after reading this brilliant paper by Kathryn Johnston and colleagues (2023): Language Games and Blurry Terminology.

To quote Braiding Sweetgrass again, because I can’t help myself:

Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together.

Thank you for wandering with me, online, offline, through the galaxy, anywhere and everywhere. Here’s to more hugs, telling friends ‘I love you’ more often, learning to read in foreign languages, and turning more Live Photo’s into gifs and phone backgrounds (so you can relive the half hug, the pure laughter that settles into a smile for the camera), and Gerald the Giraffe.