The Stories We Tell Ourselves and What We Learn to See

Last night, my eldest son took me outside to show me something.

He could do the monkey bars.

Not just one cautious swing, he moved across them smoothly, confidently. Then he spun himself around at the end and came back the other way.

It was beautiful. And it caught me completely off guard.

Movement hasn’t always come easily to him. He’s not the kind of child who launches himself off the climbing frame or scrambles to the top of a rope. He’s thoughtful and cautious. He’s strong, but not always sure of it. At school, he avoids the monkey bars altogether. Maybe he knows they don’t feel as easy for him as they seem to for others.

His younger brother - two years younger, wiry and agile - brachiates like a little gibbon. Movement has always been his first language.

But watching my eldest glide yesterday, this was a child who didn’t think of himself as someone who “can do the monkey bars”… doing the monkey bars. Beautifully.

And all we’d done was hang four Olympic rings across a rafter in the house this winter. Just something to play on. No instructions. No pressure. Just an opportunity. An affordance.

Katy Bowman has a phrase I come back to often: “We age into the shape of our habits.” Many of the things we attribute to aging, stiffness, pain, lack of strength, aren’t inevitable. They’re the result of decades of accumulated movement (or non-movement) patterns.

In other words, it’s not always about aging. It’s about how we’ve been allowed to age, how we’ve moved (or haven’t), how varied those movements were, how much of our body and environment we’ve used regularly.

That’s what I saw in my son. A winter of casual, playful swinging, in a space that welcomed it, and now suddenly, the monkey bars were no longer out of reach. They made sense to his body.

Todd Hargrove has a great quote about perceived affordances, the ability to see what actions the environment offers you. 

"Some affordances can only be perceived with skill. When a novice rock climber looks at a climbing route, he may not perceive the easiest pathway. But an experienced climber will immediately see the solution...  

...skill is perceiving the hidden affordances that are there and ready to help you, if only you can see them.

If you’ve never climbed a tree, you might see only branches. If you’ve never hung from your arms, you might not notice the bar at all. Perception and action are entangled.

It’s not just about having the strength or skill. It’s about recognising the invitation.

And this is why access matters. Not just access to physical spaces, but access to stories about who we are and what we’re capable of.

For a long time, my eldest son had a quiet story about himself: “I’m not someone who does the monkey bars.” In those exact words. But children absorb this stuff fast. They notice who climbs fastest, who lifts easiest, who gets cheered. And slowly, a narrative builds.

Sometimes, those stories stick with us for decades.

But stories can change.

When we shift the environment, when we add opportunities to move, without pressure or comparison, we make space for new stories to emerge.

Dan Edwardes has an excellent blog post on physical literacy: the idea that movement is a language, and we all deserve fluency. It’s not about being “fit” in the narrow sense, it’s about developing the confidence, coordination, strength, and self-trust to explore your world and respond to it.

In Robert Macfarlane’s beautiful book, Landmarks, about forgotten words for land, weather, and place, he talks about the ability of words’ to let people see and understand the landscape in richer ways. We can think of movement as a kind of vocabulary, too.

What we can name, we can notice.

What we can notice, we can interact with.

What we interact with, we can belong to and care about.

When parkour athletes look at a bench or wall, they don’t see passive objects - they see potential. Vaults, climbs, swings. The built world becomes a playground, not a barrier.

That perception isn’t innate. It’s trained. It’s earned. It’s learned through play and exploration and years of falling off and getting back up again.

And it works in reverse, too: action changes perception. The more we move, the more affordances we can see.

This is what we’re trying to build at WildStrong, for kids, for adults, for older people re-entering movement after a long break. We don’t need pristine gym spaces or perfect conditions. What we need are meaningful invitations. Logs to balance on. Bars to hang from. Spaces to crawl, climb, lift, play.

Because when we change what’s available, when we leave the rings up over winter, we change the story.

Watching my son swing confidently across those bars felt like a tiny revolution. Not because it was impressive in the conventional sense, though it kind of was, but because I could see the gap that had been bridged. The story rewritten. The invitation accepted.

If we want to open up movement possibilities, for ourselves, for our children, for our communities, we have to think not just about programs or exercises, but about environments. About access. About the unseen accumulations of opportunity.

Just like language, movement opens up the world. Not all at once, but incrementally. Through use. Through repetition. Through quiet confidence.

We are always shaping our bodies. Always shaping our perceptions. Always telling stories.

Let’s make them ones that open doors.