Do you have any Hobbies? - Keeping Sane through Meaningful Creation

I’ve forced myself to be a bit more sociable lately. While humans are not societal creatures, we are social creatures. The knowledge, perspective, and experiences of new people is valuable to the soul, to say nothing of the more practical benefits. We have a tendency to establish a routine and stick to it, often via the path of least resistance. My least resistant path involves going home and typing instead of heading over to movie night with my partner’s friends, or going out with someone I know. In making efforts at socializing, I’ve had more conversations than I normally would. I make myself not wander off to do something with my hands, and instead stand there and ask questions about the other person. And the question that keeps sticking in my craw as of late is “Do you have any hobbies?”

Hobbies can be anything. Often in our merch happy society, hobbies might be something as simple as collecting. I think what a person collects can tell you an awful lot about what they value. Do you have any hobbies? sounds so… cliched. It sounds like a speed-dating question, or a box to fill out at the bottom of a OkCupid profile. But the more I think about it, the more I am interested in the actual answer to that question.

The best friend I’ve made in the past year was through us working at the same office for a time. They are a terribly effective legal secretary who gets their work done admirably, and possesses physical fortitude I could only hope to imitate. They are also an actor, a formally-trained clown, bilingual, and an aerialist. None of these qualities came through through her working personality, save for the Spanish-speaking when it was necessary to the work.

This friend does not act or spin on the lyra or clown to pay rent. They do it because these respective arts pulled at something inside them. These hobbies make them more fully themselves, allow people to see them as people. My appreciation for people increases the more I find out about their creative endeavors.

Of course, hobbies are not always creative in nature. Some peoples hobbies include binging, getting trashed, or else just reading genre fiction. I love most of those things to some degree. These too, serve a purpose, a kind of soothing purpose if not an inherently creative one. When I wonder at someone’s hobbies, what I’m actually wondering is What is it you’re creating? What is it that you’ve created?

I get distinctly embarrassed when someone asks me about my fiction writing. I’m proud of the work I’m doing, but I know my words won’t match how I feel and what I’m thinking. I try to keep it brief, but more often then not end up rambling on about the craft and the stories. And I feel good talking about it. I’ve noticed that same reaction in others when I find out their creative habits.

None of the people I’ve alluded to so far pay their rent through their creative outlets. That being said, I wish they could. I wish everyone to find that balance between the practical and the creative- to blur or eliminate the line between the people we are in the office versus the people we are at our home work places where we create just for us, or just for loved ones. As long as the act of creation is meaningful to you, it matters little the economic value of the creation.

Dualities split a better part of our daily lives. Much of the sorrow, anger and nervousness we experience comes from cognitive dissonance. I’ve found that that dissonance is less prominent when I create. I’m a good worker, but I’m a better person. If you’ve got creative hobbies, share them gently. You’ll find the response is not so negative as you anticipated. There are few better feelings to bestow upon someone than genuinely earned praise for the product of their own minds.