When I think about my childhood in Jamaica, I remember being outside.
Not "outdoor time."
Not somebody scheduling an activity because children needed fresh air.
Just...outside.
We played Dandy Shandy. Marbles. Hopscotch. Chiney skip. Boom Pan Wall. Ludo. Dominoes.
When it rained, we'd race paper boats.
Boom Pan Wall was basically marbles with elastic bands. You threw yours against a wall, and if it landed over somebody else's on the ground, you got to keep them.
Apparently somebody looked at a wall and a handful of elastic bands and thought:
Yep. That's enough entertainment for the afternoon.
And it was. 😂
We made kites from plastic bags and the spines of coconut leaves and flew them right there in the middle of the street.
The boys played cricket and football.
Not on a pitch.
The street was the pitch.
Two big rocks became goalposts. Sometimes they played barefoot. And if there wasn't a football, a stuffed juice box could apparently become one.
"We don't have the equipment" wasn't much of an excuse.
Juice boxes became surprisingly elaborate trucks too, with bottle caps for wheels.
If there was a river nearby, the boys were probably swimming. Somebody might be climbing a fruit tree. Sometimes I played. Sometimes I watched. Sometimes we just walked around until something happened.
Something usually did.
And if the house was being cleaned?
You better find somewhere outside to be.
The rules were basically:
Make sure somebody knows where you are. And be home before dark.
That was it.
I don't remember anybody having to convince us to go outside.
Sometimes they had to convince us to come back in.
"Me next."
This might be the part I miss most.
You didn't always need an invitation.
If a football game was happening, you could hang around and call:
"Me next!"
If the children next door were playing, you asked to join.
There. Now you knew each other.
If somebody had a fruit tree and you wanted some, you asked if you could pick.
And the adults weren't always standing on the sidelines supervising us.
They played too.
An adult might jump into Dandy Shandy just to demonstrate how somebody full of style did it. 😂
They'd join Chiney skip. Weekend football could pull everybody in.
And somewhere nearby, there was probably a domino game going:
CLACK.
Or a Ludo match that had become far more serious than four colored pieces moving around a board had any right to be.
Outside wasn't just where children played.
It was where a lot of life happened.
Then somehow, we went inside
Today, we talk about "getting outside" like it's another thing on the wellness checklist.
Take a walk.
Get some fresh air.
Get the kids off the screens.
Go touch grass.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spend about 90 percent of their time indoors.
Ninety percent.
But I don't think we consciously chose this.
Life changed around us.
Homes became more comfortable. Air conditioning made staying inside easier. Cars changed how we moved through neighborhoods. Work moved indoors. Entertainment moved indoors.
Eventually, entertainment moved into our hands.
Now we can work, shop, order dinner, watch a movie, talk to family and have groceries delivered without leaving home.
Convenient?
Absolutely.
I'm keeping my air conditioning and delivery apps, thank you very much. 😂
But convenience changes things too.
Sometimes quietly.
Childhood changed with it
Researchers have a term for something many of us simply called childhood: independent mobility.
It's the freedom children have to move through their neighborhoods and play without an adult accompanying every step.
Research suggests that freedom has declined in many places, with traffic, safety concerns, neighborhood design and other factors influencing how independently children move around.
That doesn't mean today's parents are doing something wrong.
The world changed. Communities are different. Traffic is different. Families are different. And nostalgia has a convenient habit of editing out the bad parts.
But I do wonder what disappeared along with some of that freedom.
Because wandering outside without knowing exactly what you were going to do created something modern life doesn't always leave much room for:
Possibility.
A wall could become a game.
Two rocks could become a football pitch.
Rain could become a race.
A juice box could become practically anything.
Maybe friendship changed too
We talk a lot about how hard it is to make friends as adults.
Join a club.
Take a class.
Find a hobby group.
All reasonable advice.
But maybe friendship feels harder partly because there are fewer places where we accidentally keep running into people.
You see somebody.
Then you see them again.
Eventually you talk.
Then you talk again.
Researchers studying "third places" and social infrastructure have found that shared spaces where people regularly encounter one another can support social connection and community life.
Which makes sense.
You can't casually meet people you never encounter.
And increasingly, we don't have to encounter anybody.
We drive from one private space to another.
We order things to our doors.
We message people we already know.
We watch entertainment in our own homes.
We can live beside someone for years and barely have our lives cross.
Maybe we didn't just move indoors.
Maybe we moved into increasingly private versions of life.
Remember being bored?
There's something else hiding in those childhood memories.
We didn't need much.
A wall and elastic bands.
Paper and rainwater.
Two rocks.
A juice box.
A plastic bag and a coconut leaf spine.
Nobody needed to sell us an activity.
If entertainment wasn't immediately available, we had to decide what happened next.
Children haven't lost their imaginations because screens exist. That's too easy a story.
And I'm not going to tell you boredom secretly turns children into geniuses.
Maybe play doesn't need a superpower.
Maybe fun can just be fun.
Maybe outside isn't what I miss
I started thinking this was a story about going outside.
I'm not sure it is anymore.
Because when I remember my childhood, I'm not really nostalgic for an impressive number of outdoor minutes.
I'm remembering how easily life happened.
A football game could start because somebody had a ball.
And if nobody had one, apparently a juice box would do.
Two rocks in the street became goalposts.
A kite went up because somebody had a plastic bag.
An afternoon started because it rained and somebody folded a piece of paper.
A friendship could start because you stood at the edge of somebody else's game and shouted:
"Me next!"
Nobody called it community building.
Nobody called it social infrastructure.
We were just living.
And maybe that's what changed.
Not simply that we went inside.
But that fewer parts of life happen by accident anymore.
The neighbor you didn't know yet.
The game you weren't invited to but could still join.
The fruit tree you could ask to pick from.
The adult who stopped what they were doing long enough to show the children they still had style.
The street that could be a road one minute, a football pitch the next and a kite field after that.
Maybe "getting outside" feels like another wellness task because outside used to be where ordinary life happened.
And maybe what I'm nostalgic for isn't simply being outside.
It's having a world outside the front door that felt like ours to explore.
A world where sometimes all you had to say was:
Until next time,
Tami
Founder and Curious Editor
Roots & Rhythms
YOUR TURN
What did "outside" look like where you grew up? What game, place or completely made-up activity could keep everybody occupied for hours?
I especially want to hear the ones that would make absolutely no sense to somebody who didn't grow up where you did. 😂
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