What I Learned from Parkour

When I have a conversation about Parkour, people immediately mention daredevils jumping from rooftop to rooftop. But it's as much a mental discipline as it is a physical one.

Here's what I think we can learn from Parkour. No roof-jumping required.

• Fear is your co-pilot: Sebastien Foucan is one of the co-founders of Parkour. He's also afraid of heights which sounds like the ultimate paradox. In this talk he describes fear as merely a point of view and talks about how he has been able to practice with it. There's a perception that fear is something you have to overcome before engaging in doing something you're afraid of. Parkour teaches you to manage it but never to suppress it. Wait till the moment you become fearless and you might never jump.

• Consider the alternative paths: "Parkour vision" is the ability to see alternate paths to the one prescribed by the architecture of the city. Benches sit us, walls stop us, stairs carry us up and down. Our movements follow a script. In Parkour, you look for opportunities to re-write that script. Parkour vision is nothing less than lateral thinking or the ability to tackle a problem through creativity and play instead of logic alone. Our habits and mental frameworks are no different from benches, walls and stairs. They determine our thinking at the cost of generating new ideas.

• The obstacle is the way: Parkour is the art of working with obstacles. Railings, walls, gaps, anything in the physical world that might be considered a no-go zone is exactly what you train with. The more you train on them, the better you become at navigating the urban environment freely. Marcus Aurelius would probably have approved of Parkour when he wrote "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way". Obstacles, physical or mental, force us to increase our abilities. They are a necessary condition of our progress. We ought to seek them, not avoid them.

“Parkour Vision” or the art of seeing an alternate path (Source)