By Steve Ulvi, Journal contributor
It is most fortunate to have interests and hobbies that counter-balance wage work, family responsibilities and the many stresses of adulthood. Hobbies are dryly defined as “leisure time activities for enjoyment and relaxation with no primary intention to make a profit,” while interests are “a feeling or desire to complete or learn something.” Clearly, a hobby begins as an interest that expands in importance. Both can redirect one’s focus and aspirations over a lifetime.
Taking academic navel-gazing deeper, there is also the “Four Hobby Rule” that suggests that individuals should cultivate four distinct types of hobbies to promote well-being and fulfillment: physical, cerebral, creative and social. To become a better person and strive to be well-rounded in a renaissance way, I suppose.
Of course, the whole gamut of possible hobbies is huge and changes with the times. Hobbies are rightly seen as a window into a person, visible expressions of inner self, roots of personality that are illuminating in job interviews, applications and resumes.
Some hobbies become fashionable on a national scale such that the purveyors of essential components and places to conduct these pastimes flourish economically. For a while. Slot car racing. Miniature railroads. Quilting. Scrap booking. Painting. Some functional hobbies hold on from simpler times: sewing, knitting, tatting, embroidery and toy carving. Idle hands!
Collecting stuff promoted as collectible (someday valuable!) is a faddish, consumptive aberration of creative hobbies. Cabbage Patch dolls. GI Joe. Barbie. Svarotsky crystal animals. Special stamps. German beer steins. Commemorative coins, ad nauseam.
I admit to having a unique, pin-mounted, faux scientifically named and organized collection of Styrofoam packing “peanuts” found everywhere in Alaska, even on remote rivers back in the 1990s. Yes, it is weird and worthless.
We can meet remarkable people along the way when shared interests converge. Sometimes, serious “hobbies” are side shoots in life that become main branches that exceed career accomplishments. I met Dr. Kenelm Phillip of Fairbanks, helping him access park landscapes (previously closed to biological collection) to capture butterflies. I visited his temperature-controlled home and found the walls neatly lined with museum-quality insect drawers in floor-to-ceiling metal cabinets containing some 40,000 arctic butterfly and moth specimens as well as an immense collection of vinyl classical music and his photographs of awesome geometric fractals he continued to explore as a mathematician. He worked as a physicist.
Some youthful interests never rose to qualify as real hobbies and were left behind, never to be revived. Raising homing pigeons. Coin collecting. Baseball cards. A few of my ingrained hobbies have gone dormant, sometimes for years, until circumstances and psychological need reignite interest. Now I am picking up my long-silent guitar again.
However, a more spontaneous and unconstrained pastime, perhaps one of the most immediately gratifying to me, is simply about watching clouds, the play of light and musing about the change they may portend. Fog (clouds on the surface) makes up for less interesting marine layers during the winter. But even that monotony is broken by high pressure, giving us sparkling blue skies. No collection of anything, no possession (except for memories), free and available to all, everywhere on earth. Shape-shifting water vapor riding the layered winds and expanding in upward thermal instability or forced geographic lifting.
