Hobbies

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As I grew up I collected several hobbies. Some involved actual collecting. I collected rocks and fossils. Later, I came to be interested in collecting coins and stamps, and then I started playing with model trains and rockets. I love astronomy and I own a good telescope. My love of reading has never left me and now I read, on average, at least one book a week, usually more, on top of daily reading of two newspapers, news on the web, and monthly, a handful of magazines.

In college, and then during my graduate work, model trains and rockets were not the sorts of things I could find the time to pursue—let alone find room for in a dorm (especially the model railroad layout). Marriage and children that followed also got in the way of finding the extra time or income for trains or rockets. Stamps and coins disappeared into boxes in my closet.

Every Christmas my roommate from college still gives me the yearly proof sets issued by the US Mint of the coins they produced for that year. But otherwise, I have not done anything with my coin collection in years. Through college and my graduate years, my roommate and I would visit the post office regularly to get blocks of each new stamp that was issued. For awhile, I received first day covers of each stamp when it came out. But it’s been at least twenty years, perhaps more, since I’ve actively collected.

It is not that my interest in stamps or coins has waned, necessarily. It is, instead, that other things took priority: things like paying a mortgage and taking care of my children. They had homework, soccer practice, girl scouts, and the like.

A couple of years ago my daughters were shocked when they discovered that I had a stamp collection and a coin collection. They spent hours looking at them.

As to model rockets, the last time I launched one was when my middle daughter had to launch a rocket for her astronomy class last year. I helped her build one and that then got me involved in building a couple more rockets. For my birthday this year my wife bought me another model rocket kit. I have yet to put it together, however.

Every so often I start to think about video games. I enjoy video games, and yet it has been years since I’ve played any of them for more than five minutes. There was a time when I would spend several hours a week playing games like Doom or Duke Nuke’m. I managed to finish the game of Myst. During my graduate work at UCLA I was an early adopter of computers and spent endless hours playing text adventures such as Suspended, Zork, Station Fall, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Later, I actually programmed a couple of text adventures for a contest offered by Q-Link (the Commodore-specific forerunner of AOL). I managed to win both second and third place.

For awhile I had trouble figuring out why the various hobbies and things that I have derived so much pleasure from have fallen by the wayside over the years, like leaves falling from a tree in autumn. Even television receives less than five hours a week of my time each week now; that’s much more than I watched during college and grad school.

But as I started analyzing my days, I discovered pretty quickly what the problem is.

Obviously, I work during the day, like everyone else. In my case, spending eight hours, five days a week in front of my computer writing and rewriting. I have a weekly newspaper column to put out. I teach classes in the evenings sometimes (Hebrew, Bible, Theology). Work takes the largest chunk of time outside of sleeping. Obviously, when I was younger, work didn’t take up nearly so much time. Then I also spend time each day helping my youngest daughter with her school work: she’s on directed study due to her mental health issues.

Then I started factoring in the hours I devote to driving my children to various activities, the time that my wife wants to spend with me, such as occasionally going out for an evening, and it no longer is so odd that I have so little time left for hobbies. Reading remains the single non-work activity that I love the most and so the limited free time I have gets swallowed by that first of all. Since very few hours are left after reading, my other hobbies receive short shrift.

Life is just that way. We prioritize and manage the few hours we are granted each day, often without even thinking about them. But occasionally, it is useful to stop and reconsider what we’re doing and decide if maybe some reshuffling of priorities might not be a bad thing.

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