Choose Your Hobbies Well

By Yo Si

I don’t know how it is these days but when I was growing up (which was several decades ago), many children had one or more hobby—an activity that they were passionate about and on which they spent a good deal of their spare time. As a child, I had several hobbies, including collecting things (such as postage stamps, coins, currency notes, picture postcards, matchbox labels, catalogues from car manufacturers and toy animals), reading, listening to the radio and writing to pen-friends (this was a time long before the invention of email, when people still wrote letters by hand and sent them by post). I had few friends at school, and my many hobbies served as surrogate companions.

I was not yet ten when I was sent to a boarding school, which was located in a place far from where we lived. A major feature of the school, which might have been one of its biggest selling points, was the range of creative hobbies that it offered students, from activities like horse-riding and music to a wide range of sports and skills like sculpture and weaving. I have to confess that I excelled in none of these activities and likely took little or no interest in any of them. Back at home, my mother engaged a teacher to teach me the guitar and another teacher, to teach me painting, but here, too, I did not shine and my interest in these two activities soon evaporated. My mother arranged for a big piano to be installed in our home, which must have cost my parents a sizeable amount. I failed to make much use of this facility too, and nor did my siblings, and so the piano served little more than as a grand show piece in our drawing room.

In short, despite getting the opportunity as a child for developing many different abilities and skills through a range of creative hobbies, I turned them down. Mine was a sad case of many deliberately missed opportunities.

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Barring a few, most of my childhood hobbies, I now recognize, entailed collecting things made by others, rather than making and doing things myself. They were characterized by passive consumption, rather than active production, you could say. When I reflect on them now, I can understand how my ‘hobby habits’ did not help me much in developing creative skills and might even have inhibited them: after all, my hoarding of matchbox labels, for instance, entailed little more than the effort of procuring them and sticking them in a notebook. Similar was the case with several others of my hobbies at that time. My uncreative ‘hobby habits’, that consisted of little more than merely collecting things, likely played a major role in engendering in me a lack of enthusiasm and enterprise and an aversion to active engagement in creative activities requiring considerable physical and intellectual effort, which were to become a major feature in certain spheres in my life later on.

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When I look back at my childhood, I can recognize that I was given many opportunities to develop certain hobbies through which I could become a more creative, confident and skilled person and that I failed to make good use of them. This was due perhaps to lack of interest, indifference, fear, diffidence, or sheer laziness. I was content with hobbies that entailed little effort on my part. As a result, I missed out on many chances that I got to develop the abilities to grow into a person who could add value to the world through engaging in creative and socially useful activities.

It is of course now pointless my regretting these many missed opportunities to grow through creative hobbies that I received as a child. It is simply too late, half a century or so later, to do anything about it. But being conscious of how valuable such opportunities are can now help me never to let them pass by if and when they come my way even now, in my present stage of life, as they possibly will. Additionally, knowing, on the basis of my own personal experience, how precious such opportunities are and why one must avail them so that one can use them to become a more able and creative person and thus of more valuable to the world, I can help others know why they should not make the same mistakes that I did in this matter.