Adult movement practice has a particular vocabulary it uses to describe itself. Training. Discipline. Development. Mastery. The words insist on a difference between what serious adults do with their bodies and what children do on a Saturday afternoon. One is work — chosen, demanding, justified by what it produces. The other is what you grew out of. Nick Anastasia, asked to describe his own practice, doesn’t reach for the adult vocabulary at all.

“It’s just a more sort of complicated way of hanging out with your friends and playing with blocks when you’re a little kid. We’re putting the blocks together, we’re just building really weird, strange blocks.”

He’s talking about parkour. He’s also talking about designing scaffolding setups, inventing technical challenges, swinging through under-bars in spaces he’s built with friends. The list of activities is unmistakably adult — the venues are gyms and warehouses, the materials are pipe and Kee Klamps, the planning involves serial conversations with collaborators about what to build next. And Anastasia, who does all this seriously enough to make a living teaching it, says it’s blocks. Different blocks than the ones he used at six. Same activity.

Notice that he isn’t making an analogy. The adult-and-the-kid-are-similar move is familiar; everyone has heard the speech about the importance of staying playful. Anastasia is making a stronger claim. The activity didn’t get replaced. It got more complicated. The blocks now have specific dimensions and load ratings, the friends now have day jobs, the configurations require power tools and permits, and underneath all of that is the same thing he was doing on the floor of his childhood living room. Friends. Objects. Combinations. Time.

This collapses a distinction the culture works hard to maintain. Adults justify their practices instrumentally — by what they produce. Fitness. Skill. Employability. Mental health benefits. The community of like-minded weirdos that helps you stay sane. The implicit logic is that an adult should be able to defend any non-work hour spent on a non-productive activity by pointing at the return. The kid playing with blocks doesn’t have this problem. The blocks are not producing anything. The kid is not extracting value. The kid is putting blocks together because putting blocks together is what they’re doing this afternoon, and nobody asks them to justify it because nobody needs them to.

What Anastasia’s framing implies, if you take it literally, is that the kid’s position was the honest one and the adult’s accumulated justifications are a kind of cover story. The activity didn’t suddenly start needing reasons when you grew up. It just started seeming embarrassing without them. The fitness, the skill, the community — these are real, they’re worth noting, and they aren’t why the practice is happening. The practice is happening because putting blocks together is what some humans do, given any chance, across the entire lifespan, with whatever blocks are available. The accumulated justifications are what we say at dinner parties when asked what we do all weekend.

Try the experiment of dropping them, just briefly. Strip the productivity-frame off your practice and see what’s actually underneath. The training calendar still looks the same. The session still takes the same amount of time. The work still asks the body to do hard things, and the body still says yes some days and no others. None of the structural content goes away when the justifications do. What goes away is the apologetic vocabulary you were going to deploy if someone asked what it was for. The honest answer is the kid’s answer: this is the thing I’m doing this afternoon.

This is not an anti-discipline argument. Anastasia builds elaborate setups. He coaches. He thinks rigorously about how to design spaces that invite particular kinds of movement. The complexity is real and earned. What he’s refusing isn’t the work — it’s the importation of an adult-seriousness frame that treats the work as something that requires defense. Blocks with friends turn out to be sustainable for decades when nobody is asking them to justify themselves. They turn out to develop real skill — they just don’t need a press release.

What gets harder, in this frame, is performing seriousness. You can’t easily sell a practice you describe as blocks. You can’t easily explain to a hiring manager that you spent your twenties learning to swing through narrow spaces because swinging through narrow spaces was the activity. The justifications aren’t lies; they’re translations. They convert blocks into a language that the parts of life that demand productivity will accept. The translation is fine, often necessary, sometimes useful. It’s just not what the practice actually is.

What gets simpler is everything else. The friends are friends. The objects are objects. The combinations are combinations. The hours pass in the way hours pass when you’re doing the thing you’re doing, without the parallel running commentary about whether it’s allowed. Anastasia, twenty-some years in, isn’t doing something different from the kid he was. He’s doing the same thing with bigger blocks, and he’s noticed, and he isn’t pretending otherwise.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Play with Nick Anastasia,” published May 25, 2022.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.