Writing blogs is a great hobby. I hope I do get that bribe from the marketing team now, for saying that. Truisms apart, we all can admit writing an essay sometime back in the past that might have read as ‘My Hobby’. It was probably the exercise that introduced us to terms like philately and numismatics, when we had to fabricate stuff in the absence of none!
However fictional our accounts may have been then, the importance of an ‘effective hobby’ today is only heightened by our demanding routines and machinated tasks that risk lazying up the brain over a period of time. Even in the most interesting sounding jobs, there are tasks that can prove extremely boring to someone on the inside, however cool it may look on the outside.
A session drum player who happens to be a good friend of yours truly, has a hobby of computer programming! No seriously, he does something for a hobby that might be routine for us. He says that practicing the same loop over clichéd backing tracks is extremely monotonous and bordering on moronic, and that he needs an outlet like computer programming to ‘preserve the sanity’.
For someone on the outside, this person’s full-time job of playing drums seems like the best job ever. Inside the circle of things however, it’s a different story. What I intend to clarify is that hobbies are a matter of perspective and this article doesn’t in any way indicate or suggest (irrespective of your agreement) that your job is boring enough to need a hobby. The point is that almost all jobs, come with a certain degree of stress and mundaneness in certain aspects hence necessitating hobbies for our lives.
What are effective hobbies? Effective hobbies curb stress, nurture creativity and are ideally completely different from our regular jobs. I may even go to the extent of saying that effective hobbies push yourselves to go out of the comfort zone that quicksands us in our jobs sometimes.
So what is a great balance? Great balance is an equation, on the left side of which are the animate agents namely, you, your family and your colleagues while on the right side of the equation you have feelings and emotions such as anger, peace, inspiration, security etc. The balance of this equation depends on a number of factors, one of the them (but not foremost) being your hobbies.
Having established the importance of hobbies as such, let me go ahead and say that your hobbies start right from the moment you step out of your work premises. Your hobby cannot involve things that you have to do, like sleeping or doing laundry or taking care of the kids (Though some significant debate on the third option has been witnessed). Effective hobbies must remain outside the domain of everything related to work. Hobbies need to be very specific in this respect. As an example, taking care of your kids is too wide and big an activity without mention of specifics. However, ‘knitting sweaters for kids’ or ‘building lego towns with my son’, are legit hobbies!
In part II of this blog, we see how to effectively build and take advantage of some good hobbies.
(Photo: Deviantart)
