Not-so-secret secret here: I can be a bit of a control freak in my own way. It doesn’t manifest in the stereotypical ways… I don’t try to micromanage the people I work with or freak out if there’s snow instead of sun. I know that an honest sense of productive happiness depends on one’s attitude, so I have come up with dozens of strategies to manage my attitude, and I enforce them upon myself with robotic rigor. The use of different colors at different times of year, or the distribution of meditative walks, or the codified shorthand of my to-do lists… these are just a few of these strategies. Sometimes they actually do work. Occasionally they are more burdensome than they are worth. Symbology, personal and cultural, is key… so you can imagine that as I’m approaching my fortieth birthday this year, I’m itching to find some meaning in the event.
I’m hoping to write a series of blog posts – extemporaneous, unscripted, mostly unedited – to reflect on turning 40. I’m doing it mostly for myself, but I’ll post them here in case they are of interest to others. Maybe I’ll finish them, or maybe not. There’s a lot going on.
And this is the fourth.
“Hobby” is such a dismissive, trivializing word. Its modern use derives from that antique toy “the hobby horse,” that is, a device for children, a device for enjoyment, and a very naive, unsophisticated enjoyment at that.
A “hobby” is the sort of thing we expect Paul to have been referring to in 1 Corinthians when he says that “when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Adults, he seems to say, don’t indulge in their hobby horses. Their minds are preoccupied with more serious, grave matters.
On the other hand, we get a much more supportive vibe from the wonderful motto of the eight-hour day movement: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will.” The Knights of Labor and other early unions opposed the exploitation and abuse of their rank-and-file by pushing for hours that would allow workers to also enjoy leisure and better health. “Hobbies” aren’t specified in the eight hours for “what you will,” but slogan is built around an essential freedom: “what you will.” It can be whatever you want it to be.
When I was a kid, I had a lot of things that might have fallen under the category of hobbies, and some of these plugged more or less into activities that have remained important to me as an adult. I had an early interest in dinosaurs, and space, and science, later joined by fiction and reading. Riding my bike was always fun. For a while I tried figure skating. I hungered for video games.
The first I really delighted in a hobby, however — a defined activity with tasks and opportunities with which I would have happily filled an eight hour “what you will” — I was ten or eleven years old at the lakeside cottage of a family friend. My parents and their friends were going over a game book, trying to understand its rules, and generally finding the whole thing rather silly. It almost looked like a bootleg book; a cover with amateurish art of some hideous beast being attacked by a man in scaled armor and a wizard shooting a bolt of lightning from a staff. It was an early softcover-with-staples rulebook for Dungeons and Dragons and I was enchanted by the possibility there.
I did manage, on that vacation, to play the game a little with the grown-ups but they weren’t that into it. I don’t remember what they were into but it seemed they saw the game more as a hobby horse or as a childish thing. I didn’t care, myself, about how adult or how childish it was. It was an opportunity to explore worlds and, being constrained by reasonable rules and the rubber wheels of my bike, the idea of disarming diabolical traps in pursuit of a treasure or seeking to free an imprisoned Elven priestess from the clutches of some monster in the shadowy forest was absolutely electrifying.
I lucked out, when I got home that summer… none of the kids on my block were interested in the game, but I wasn’t much farther from Victor, a kid I knew from church, and I had just gotten permission to jog a half-mile north and east from my own house to visit with him and his brothers. We’d go down into his basement with a few mismatched books, a few random dice we’d pilfered from board games, and our red pop and notebook characters marked up with our characters. Later, we invited other friends and they got in the fun. Some of us are still friends thirty years later. And, for the most part, my parents humored my newfound interest. For my birthday I got the SSI Pool of Radiance game for our IBM 286. I never beat the impossible game — Tyranthraxus, the demonic spirit, eluded me til the very end — but I did explore the world far-and-wide around the pioneer town of Phlan. The gloomy banks of the Stojanow River. The marching ranks of the Zhentilar. The eerie quiet that settled over Sokol Keep. The fierce mountains that guarded the passes to Vaasa.
Twenty years later, I still play Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve set the game down, sometimes for months or years at a time, but despite the five editions that have bubbled up from the depths since I first held that ratty book — jaunts toward Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms — gaming has always felt as easy as kicking off on a bike. I’ve seen the essays and articles linking this sort of game with greater empathy and understanding for the world, and maybe even worldly success itself, but even this possibility is somehow beside the point. It works because it is play. It happens because it is fun. Yes, it is a uniquely complex, sophisticated sort of hobby horse but, most importantly, it is “what I will.”
Completely different but thoroughly the same, I’ve more recently picked up gardening as a hobby. I wish I could say that I was as good at gardening as I am at Dungeons and Dragons. A key difference between the two: if you set your Players Handbook down it will be more-or-less the same as you left it whenever you get around to the game. If you try the same thing with your green beans, you’ll find that they’re swollen to bursting, nibbled by rabbits, wilting around their edges, and completely swarmed with weeds. I can say this with confidence because right now our green beans are begging for some attention. I recently told a friend that the situation here is that I have planted a ten hour a week garden, but I’m only giving it three or four. That’s enough to keep things from dying, but not enough to fully enjoy what the yard has to offer.
I probably caught the gardening bug from my mom. When I was a kid, we planted a vegetable garden in my grandmother’s backyard and grew some magnificent corn, watermelons, and pumpkins… but mostly I remember the tremendous amount of work that went into keeping that little patch of land. More vividly, however, I remember poring through my mom’s gardening books as she was working on her landscaping certificate when I was fourteen years old. Books on perennials, books on annuals, books on Japanese gardening, books on shrubs. When I got older and found myself, as a reader and writer, drawn particularly to the early English gothicists, I noted their almost universal interest in gardens. The wild violence of nature, encapsulated in their understanding of “sublimity” via mountains, storms, and cataracts was soothed and counteracted by the picturesque gardens of their characters’ noble estates. Picturesque meaning graceful but untidy, serene but unregimented, productive but casual… a worthy subject for a picture, to paraphrase Alexander Pope. And of course, I’m not a Mott or a Sloan; I couldn’t build one of those palatial gardens. But the picturesque shrunk down for first tenant farmers and then the urban middle-class was the cottage garden. And so, ever since we moved into this house seven years ago, I’ve tried to keep a cottage garden here.
I’ll admit, vegetable beds are more practical (and quite lovely in their own ways… who can deny the sinuous love of the pumpkin patch or the delicious fragrance of thyme on the fingers?) but I’ve always been partial to the more difficult and impractical choices: the old-fashioned rose bushes with nettles as thick as comb bristles and as long as your thumb or the mounding juniper bush that scratches your arms when you try to weed around it. The honeysuckle that runs rampant and destroys your awning. These are my favorites.
Actually, I take that back. My very favorite is alchemilla mollis, or lady’s mantle, a hardy, lovely, low-maintenance perennial that fans out accordion-shaped fronds each spring, studded with spokes of yellow-green flowers each July, and continues to green the gray all the way through October and well into November. It shares its Latin root with the word “alchemy,” because those shallow fronds collected the morning dew in big beads, thought to have medicinal value.
Just as I never feel that my time rolling dice and telling stories about dragons with my friends is wasted time, I also hope that I can find a way to make more time for my garden in the future.
That is, indeed, the dilemma: time. Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what you will. It seems perfectly reasonable and, given the billions of people worldwide who do not enjoy this fecundity of time, I shouldn’t dwell on its modest dissatisfactions. Yet the more you experience the riches of the world — and not necessarily riches of wealth and objects — the more you realize that there is unlimited wonder to experience.
I’ve indulged myself a bit over this summer.
I’ve made a few selfish purchases.
I bought myself a fishing rod not long ago. I enjoyed fishing when I was young and would like to try it again.
I bought myself a set of disk golf disks… there’s a beautiful rolling course a few miles from my house and I’m itching to try it out.
There are so many wonderful, delightful, sophisticated, and playful hobby horses in the world today, and they each offer their own delicious enticements. It seems a waste not to live life to its fullest. But both life and time are finite. Even eight hours of what you will gets devoured by the clock faster than you’d like. I hope I get to visit that disk golf course. I hope I get to go fishing with my daughter. I hope I get weed those flower beds. I hope I get to roll those dice. I hope I get to take long walks. I hope I get to read all those gothic and magical realist novels. I hope I get to visit a cherry orchard. I hope I get to hike on Isle Royale. I hope I get to dance for days and days. I hope, I hope, I hope, and…
…calm down, dude.
The most important thing about a hobby horse is to enjoy it.
That’s why it exists.
Step outside.
Take a deep breath.
Smell those roses.
Dance those days.