That was my father’s response when I expressed a wish to take up ice hockey at 15 years of age. I had watched both of my brothers play over the years. They each began at the young age of six; lifted out onto the ice by adults, where they remained stationary and banged their oversized sticks at the ice.
Of course, while his answer left a bit of a sting, I had plenty of hobbies to keep me busy. I was off playing the piano and saxophone, and doing dance, theater and field hockey. That’s the thing about being young, someone else (mom or dad) jam packs your schedule with activities and also deals with any arising logistical nightmares. As the years go by, the number of activities diminishes and playtime all but disappears—kinda like naptime.
Like a midday siesta though, play is beneficial to adults. Experts claim that adult play yields “greater individual satisfaction and innovation,” according to a recent WIRED article. In Beyond Love and Work: Why Adults Need to Play, clinical professor of psychiatry at UC-San Francisco, Doctor Lenore Terr makes the claim that “The lack of play dulls a person and it may well be that an overall lack of play dulls a society”—after all, you never see a bored 4-year-old, yet I can count two hands full of 20- and 30-somethings walking around disenchanted with life.
So armed with a list of over 101 hobbies my friend plucked off the Internet, I decided to start a hobby blog. A combo pursuit for passion and a bit of distraction, I revisit hobbies I used to have and embark on unexplored ones.
So far, I’ve made my way through amateur astronomy, astrology (including Tarot card reading), balloon animal making and basket weaving with magazines—some more successfully than others. There was a bit of a terrifying incident with a modeling balloon, as I literally tried to wrestle it into the shape of a dog. Frustrated, and with sweat collecting on my brow, I ended up with something that resembled sausage links. I do have to say that I was quite adept at astrology—although I did NOT enjoy learning details about my death.
Whether I ended up mastering the hobby or not isn’t really the point, it’s more about the hunt and getting back that precious childhood commodity of play. I still have many hobbies ahead of me: beatboxing, guerilla gardening, noodling, tombstone rubbing, vexillology and more.
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