Never Leave The Playground

“ I’ve known Stephen for about 19 years and he has always lived what he teaches about never leaving the playground. He has taken me on many trips kayaking in boats of his own design and manufacture, skateboarding, biking, and hiking, rope walking, and making pottery, which he is a master at. He is young of heart and mind, fit beyond people 20 or more years his junior. But most important, Stephen is just fun to be around!”

Just spent a week at JCCFS taking pottery classes from Stephen. I got a mix of his fantastic pottery skills with some valuable observations on life. Looking forward to the next time!

Designed to Move is the title of my new book following up on Sitting Kills Moving Heals. Thank you Stephen for being such a fan. It’s mutual of course. Designed to move gets into the mechanics of optimal motion. We are designed to be perpetual motion machines –cannot think of anyone other than you who better fits this description — that need to use frequent, low to moderate, not high, intensity movement as a tuning fork throughout our waking hours, — ping, ping, ping, on and off. Untuned we are like a piano that has dried out. That’s us., we shrivel and die.

I stumbled across Stephen a year or two ago and found both his outlook and creativity fascinating. There is a lot of thinking outside the box (you’d probably find Stephen leapfrogging the box!) and innovation, I found myself relating to it and proceeded to draw inspiration and ideas, I still regularly practice balancing and other small ways to invigorate the body and teach it new skills, all with the added benefit of rewiring the brain. A recent activity being teaching myself to draw (or write) with left and right hand simultaneously – something I wasn’t sure was possible, but I thought, why not? and sure enough, it was do-able. This is an extension of Stephen’s philosophy and I recommend everyone to stop in at Never Leave the Playground and learn from Stephen. All the best, Stephen, and thanks!

I’ve followed your pieces for months and I have concluded you are most interested in living life. Not studying it. I agree with your assertion that computer games prepare ‘people’ to be good in computer games. That is fine. We live in a ‘computerized’ world now. I am 65 and revel in the real, the present, the raw and that is what I dig about your work.