playfulness
it's not a big deal. it's only everything.
it's not a big deal. it's only everything.
What if kids have it right, and bursts of ridiculousness keep us young?
What if the absence of play creates the conditions for decay?
I spent years researching cliff-edge death and vitality across six kingdoms of life. I looked at humans. Slime molds. Air plants. Lilies. Worms. Flies and more. The pattern held everywhere. My hypothesis?
From molecules to muscle to mind...
Play Prevents Decay.
It improves performance. It creates a radical sense of belonging in your own body. And it does this across every kingdom of life, down to single-celled organisms that have no brain, no nervous system, and no reason to play except that it works.
You already do this. You did it this morning. You took the stairs a little too fast. You carried all the grocery bags in one trip just to see if you could. You danced for two seconds in the kitchen when nobody was watching. Nobody told you any of that counted.
It counted.
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The room · a founding circle
Most of us are alive and absent. The senses dull, the signal goes quiet, and we call it getting older. It is not. It is disuse, and disuse reverses.
What the room is now:
A small founding circle, three months, writing two books in the open with me. Alive and Absent, on disconnection and the ways back to feeling, for adults. And a chill kids' book starring the VILPA Beast, on the science of never letting your play go quiet.
A live call every week. You get the material before anyone else, put it into your own body, and bring back what happened. Sensory awakening, a little bioplasticity, and the small daily doses of vigor the research says change the odds of a whole life.
The point was never the chapters. It is the room. Two nervous systems in contact is the fastest way a body comes back online, and a live circle is exactly that.
One hundred a month, for three months. Then both books are yours.
Step into the circleLimited to a small founding circle. The room stays a room.
We are advocating for June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, to become Floor Is Lava Day. Worldwide. Every year. One day when the whole planet agrees: the floor is not safe, and the only way to survive is to play.
Stores will have lava zone kits. Yoga studios will run balance-as-play classes. Gyms will mark off lava zones with stickers on the floor. Schools will turn hallways into obstacle courses. Parks will have guided areas. Your living room will have a pile of pillows and a rule everyone already knows.
Stand on one leg. Balance on a curb. Hop from cushion to cushion with your kids. Recruit every system your body has and call it a game. The mortality predictor delivered as play. Everywhere. At once.
June 21, 2026. The first one. Be part of it.
Rigorously ridiculous. The science is serious. The entry point is a jester.
A constraint with no freedom is a prison. Freedom with no constraint is just noise, and the body can't do anything with noise. Play is the room between those two. The room where something can surprise you and you can survive the surprise. Games are built this way. So are good conversations. So is every story that ever changed somebody.
Play does not demand freedom of range of motion.
A wheelchair user can play. A person with one working arm can play. A person lying in bed can surprise themselves for three seconds and that counts. If the thesis only worked for the able-bodied, it would not be true. It would just be fitness wearing a costume.
The absence of play is not laziness. It is not a personality trait. It is a slow, quiet narrowing of the range a body can operate in. I call it quiet violence. Not a wound. A draining. A body that stopped turning toward surprise. A mind that stopped offering it.
And here is the trap the wellness world does not talk about. The healing protocol that has become a grind is doing the same thing. The ice bath you dread. The breath practice that feels like homework. The supplement stack you manage like a second pharmacy. The optimization that turned your body into a spreadsheet. (You know the feeling. The moment you started dreading the thing that was supposed to save you.) The moment the work lost its play, the body stopped receiving it as medicine and started receiving it as demand. Same input. Different nervous system. The range narrows under the flag of progress, and nobody notices because the metrics still move.
The metrics moving is not the same as the body opening. The body opens when the work is play. (And it knows the difference. It always knows.)
That is not a philosophy. That is polyvagal biology. A system that plays is broadcasting safety. A system grinding through a protocol is broadcasting endurance. Both produce data. Only one actually widens the range.
The research agrees
Adults who cannot balance on one leg for ten seconds have an 84% higher risk of dying within the next decade. Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. 1,700 participants. Adjusted for age, sex, BMI, and existing conditions. The ability to hold a single-leg stance independently predicts whether you will be alive in ten years.
Researchers have found that as little as three to four minutes of vigorous intermittent activity scattered through an ordinary day is associated with significant reductions in all-cause mortality. Not exercise. Not training. Just living with occasional intensity, little vignettes of effort that last less than a minute each. They call it VILPA. You already call it taking the stairs.
Jaak Panksepp identified play as one of seven primary emotional systems hardwired into every mammalian brain. It is not a luxury behavior. It is a biological drive as fundamental as fear, care, and grief.
Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory demonstrates that the nervous system requires signals of safety to access its full range. Play is the body's native safety signal. A system that plays is a system broadcasting: I am not in danger right now.
Peter Levine's somatic experiencing framework shows that unresolved stress lives in the body as incomplete motor responses. Small bursts of movement, shaking, bouncing, spontaneous physical discharge, are the body's way of completing those responses. Every microburst closes a circuit the body left open.
Floor Is Lava
Read that balance study again. Ten seconds on one leg. 84% mortality increase for those who can't hold it. That is not a fitness test. That is a systems integration test. Proprioception, vestibular function, visual processing, muscular coordination, and neurological speed all firing together in a single moment.
Now consider what a child does when someone yells "floor is lava."
They stand on one leg. They balance on a couch arm. They hold a weird angle on a chair back. They recruit every one of those systems simultaneously, in a burst, for the length of the game.
Floor Is Lava is the mortality predictor delivered as play. The same mechanism. The same neural recruitment. One is a test in a lab with a clipboard. The other is a game every child on earth already knows. Nobody had to explain it to them. Their bodies just knew what to do with the constraint.
Fear Division. Calibrated fright. Play with the dark. The shadow arm of playfulness.
Fear work and shadow work for adults. Trauma, and the kind we inherit and hand down without meaning to. Some doors back into the body are dark ones, and they are still doors.
This is the pattern. The truth that cannot be received raw, received inside a game. The data says: your balance predicts whether you live or die. That is hard to hold. Try telling someone that at a dinner party. But "floor is lava" delivers the same training inside a container the body recognizes as safe. The body does the work. The mind never has to metabolize the fear.
A boy in a story I know understood this intuitively. He played so fiercely his body refused to age. He could hold any truth, no matter how devastating, as long as the truth was wearing a costume. As long as the truth was playing.
He had it right. He just never went through the rite.
The playing kept him alive. The sitting down set him free.
What people feel
Projects & Patrons
Hardcore Combat
Full-contact free form combat with padded swords. Maximum intensity, minimal consequence. The players set the rules, always.
hardcorecombat.com →Alive & Absent
A book written in the open, and a founding circle writing it together. Disconnection syndrome, and the ways back home.
step into the circle →Pan Eternal
The true story of Peter Pan. A dark literary trilogy, twenty years in the making.
paneternal.com →Fear Division
Calibrated fright. Play with the dark. Rooted in twenty-five years of haunted attractions.
fear & shadow work →Breath Fluency
Breathwork for connection. Co-created with Miles Lukas. Six weeks of practice.
coming soonThe Pivot
One curved object. One foot on, one foot free. The balance trainer that fits in a bag.
pivot.how →World of Lava
The oldest coordination curriculum on earth, rebuilt. Seven levels. Four modes.
worldoflava.com →Corporate patrons of the Playfulness Art Fund
The doors opened June 6, 2026, my 48th birthday, with a gathering at Eminent Center in Scottsdale, live music, and the first somatic play. Now the room is gathering its founding circle, a small group writing two books in the open with me. Alive and Absent for adults, and a kids' book starring the VILPA Beast, on never letting your play go quiet. step into the circle →
Not today, decay.
it's not a big deal. it's only everything.