The Hobby Seeker
Weekly Epiphanies: (Warning: it's a long post) creativity under constraints, being serious about a hobby, Father tongue, motherland by Peggy Mohan
Hello Dear Readers,
I am back at my favourite spot in the balcony, and the morning looks gorgeously fresh, clean, and green after a whole night of rain. The sun is missing, which can seem depressing if it happens over an extended period, but having seen what a harsh sun can do in Singapore, I am enjoying the respite. A coolness pervades the atmosphere, and I feel relaxed. I know all of this is temporary. The cool breeze on my feet like an air conditioner set at 25 degrees, the reflective pace of thinking, and even the comfort of the armchair.
My week has been rather busy, as my relaxed routine has been upended by a new volunteering gig. It’s an entirely new experience for me, and what excites me the most is interacting with a diverse team of similarly driven individuals from across the world. I’ll share more about my experience in the coming weeks, but these are still early days, and I am still learning the ropes of working in a sociocratic environment.
This gig takes me back to my days of constrained creativity when I was trying to write in the midst of juggling professional and personal commitments. I am taking it easy, not challenging myself too much since my brain and body are not as young as when I started writing or began my career. However, my commitment to my novel has surprised me in the past weeks.
Despite working on multiple tasks requiring multiple intelligences, which often makes me tired at the end of the day, I have kept up with my editing milestones. Editing is not as creatively taxing as writing is for me, so I cannot say that I am succeeding at balancing my creative and volunteering life. However, at least challenging my daily schedule gives me a chance to examine my priorities in microscopic detail and with telescopic vision.
This morning, I listened to a podcast on Creativity and Constraints. It reminded me of how I started my blogging journey. The exhilaration of breaking the shackles of time, place, regimented thinking, and standard processes offered me more creative satisfaction than when I wrote with ample time and deeper reflection. But I wonder if it was creative satisfaction or merely a dopamine hit. I remember telling a colleague that my blog posts came out like scrambled eggs while his wife (a writer) made perfect omelettes. Both offer nourishment, but one is a hastily prepared snack, and the other is a work of art. Although, I would say scrambled eggs also require effort and expertise.
With my new gig, I am eager to see how I tackle the constraints on time and energy. Will it affect my writing style or routine, or will I stop writing altogether? Only time will tell. For now, I am focused on my novel’s final round of edits. I can afford to procrastinate the actual writing phase for some more time once the novel is done because my next set of short stories is languishing in a folder, waiting to be polished before I publish them. Until then, I can fool myself into thinking that a busy routine doesn’t affect my creativity.
The relationship between creativity and constraints also brings me to the topic of hobbies. Does one veer towards hobbies more often when operating under a constrained schedule, or do the hobbies die out as life takes over?
I have had to introduce myself in countless meetings in the last few weeks. With my hotchpotch profile of engineering, management, consulting, business development, and fiction writing, I often stick to what is relevant to the group for the task at hand. I find it easier to call myself a storyteller, but that word means so many different things to different people that I have to explain. People tend to get confused when a storyteller turns up at an app development meeting and starts spouting project management tenets or the importance of creating user journeys. Ultimately, my introductions are always task-oriented and hence incomplete.
The young volunteers in the group are more willing to bring their complete selves to the meetings. They talk about their experience, expertise, and things they enjoy in life, especially their hobbies.
After a few such introductions, I wondered whether I had any hobbies. Writing was one when I was a consulting professional, but it has metamorphosed into a much larger purpose and passion.
I used to be an amateur birdwatcher before I started tracking my bank balance as remuneration for suffering the corporate world. The hobby dropped off my radar after chronic inflammation hampered my long-distance vision and ability to focus through a pair of binoculars.
I became interested in photography when I bought a smartphone and realised that one need not lug a heavy camera around the neck to capture natural landscapes in a fairly decent manner. However, I am more of an outdoor photographer, which means that the hobby depends on me going on long walks, if not for a jaunt around the block. I have now placed additional time and energy constraints on pursuing photography as a hobby. How much we love excuses!
During one of the task-based discussions, an experienced volunteer said that he would not be available on a certain day of the week because that’s the day he goes to play his favourite game, not a sport, a game. His commitment to his hobby was inspiring.
Many of us trivialise our hobbies so much that we drop them from our schedule at the first sign of burgeoning work commitments. I remember writing about how one need not take on hobbies as an additional item on your daily to-do list. Hobbies should arise naturally. I wrote the post more than a decade ago when a cousin reached out on how to tackle this inevitable question in B-School interviews- “What are your hobbies?” The interviewers don’t even bother to ask whether you have a hobby. It is implied that you should have one. My point in the post was not to burden yourself with the idea that one should have a hobby.
However, now that I have seen what a working life has to offer a young MBA graduate embarking upon an ambitious career, I would go out on a limb and say that one should be serious about at least one hobby. It will keep you in good stead when you reach the enviable stage where work, compensation, and corporate titles cease to define your life.
I enjoy certain activities for now, but I have nothing that I can claim to be a serious hobby. On that note, when does an activity you enjoy become a hobby?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
Reading Life
I have gone into the slow reading phase with Peggy Mohan’s Father Tongue, Motherland. If you have read her previous book, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages, you might find this book less intimidating. Peggy Mohan is a linguist, and although her book is accessible to the layperson, she still peppers her writing with research findings and technical terms from a linguist’s world. Her previous book introduced me to the world of creoles, pidgins, and the difference between being bilingual and diglossic. Being a multiglossic myself, I found the language development theories in the book fascinating.
Father Tongue, Motherland is much more palatable for common readers and offers bite-sized feasts of history, culture, migration, anthropology, and linguistics.
That’s all from me this week.
Happy reading, happy creating, and go find a hobby if you haven’t already!
Sudeepa
Hobbies are vastly underrated. Over the decades, they've been my lifeboat, especially birdwatching, to navigate rough waters. Oddly, though, the word "hobby" seems misunderstood - as though it's a fleeting cloud. Sometimes, it's the sky even.