Finding Play in Endeavour

By Sandy Glanfield

Reflections on our latest Let’s Reboot the Future episode with Emilio

Listening to Emilio Garcia Padron on the podcast this week stirred something deep and familiar in me. There was a moment when he talked about experimenting as a child. He was trying to find a natural and non harmful way to keep pests away from food in the garden. The way he described that early curiosity and the freedom to play through a problem brought me straight back to my own childhood.

I remembered the excitement of noticing something that was not quite right and believing I might be able to fix it. I remembered chemistry sets and little kits for making things. For me it was nearly always sewing. The thrill of wondering how I could bring pieces together to create something beautiful. But really it was never only about the finished product. It was the endeavour itself that lit me up.

When Emilio talks about adults and play in the garden, I recognise that feeling of flow. That feeling of being so absorbed in something that the work stops feeling like work. There is a moment when the challenge is exactly the right size and your mind begins to hum with possibility. The cogs turn, the imagination sparks, and you feel alive in the very best way.

For Emilio, that spark often arrives outdoors. For me it has come through making. For others it will be something entirely different. Yet most of us know that sensation when our curiosity meets a small opening in the world around us and something inside us says follow that.

It made me realise that this is often the place where naivety truly begins. Not the naïve that people sometimes dismiss, but the softer, more powerful version. The openness to notice something. The belief that it might be possible to make it better. The willingness to try, experiment and learn. The joy of bringing your whole self into the process.

There is something profoundly human about that. It feels close to the Golden Rule too, because when we follow that spark, we are often trying to make life a little better for someone or something beyond ourselves. We are responding to what we notice with care. We are acting as if our small endeavour might ripple outwards.

And I keep wondering. What if more of us could feel that energy again. What if more people had permission and space to marvel at the world around us and to bring that fascination into the challenges we face. What if work, especially the work of solving our hardest problems, could feel less like drudgery and more like discovery.

We need places where people can experiment and fail and try again. Places where the spark of naivety is not seen as childish but as a beginning point for imagination and courage. Places where the Golden Rule is not an abstract idea but something felt in the body, something that guides how we create and how we care.

Listening to Emilio reminded me that the answers we need sometimes start in these small moments of wonder. Maybe our task is to notice them, nurture them and follow them. And maybe, just maybe, that is how we help reboot the future.