Time for hobbies

“We’re fine in here, we’ve got a really good book to read.” (The Covered Wagon — painting by Charles Tschaggeny, 1868)

Due to, ya know, efforts to rein in a global pandemic, an unprecedented number of people are going to be staying home for an unprecedented amount of time.

Many of them are used to filling life with work and structured activities. What now?

Regardless of a person’s age, they are going to wander around listlessly if they’re not used to having all that free time. That’s why they’ll need to invest in a hobby.

Boredom doesn’t come from doing the same activity for a long time. It comes from lack of engagement. It comes from skating over the surface of things without making a deeper commitment. So when we can give ourselves over to a pursuit, immersing ourselves in it, we’re not going to be bored.

It’s easiest to get to this point of full engagement if we’re in “the Goldilocks zone” — that is, whatever we’re trying to do is not too easy and not too hard. That’s why video games are so addictive: They get us into that Goldilocks zone right from the start, and continuously calibrate the level of difficulty to remain in the Goldilocks zone even as we are improving and progressing.

It’s harder to do this without the benefit of a finely-tuned, adaptive algorithm, but if you can push through the initial stages of discomfort with a new skill, you do begin to find your perfect learning zone (also called the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD).

With tons of time at home, you and your kids can take up handcrafts, painting and drawing, reading a challenging book, playing a musical instrument, or anything else that demands a bit of attention up front in order to receive a payoff farther down the line.

For example, if you give yourself ten minutes to check out a new book, you’ll pass on it if you encounter unfamiliar language or have trouble orienting yourself right away to the setting and plot.

But if you’ve got eight hours of unbroken, unfilled time ahead of you, maybe you can dig into it a little. You can try again, because there’s nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. After the first few pages, you find yourself getting into the story. The hard part is over.

Similarly, most beginning musicians dabble. They play for a few minutes a day, and that’s it. Well, again, if you have all day to play your trombone, you might let yourself go past dabbling. Instead of quitting after 15 minutes, you keep going, only to discover that now you’re warmed up and you can get a much better tone than you could at the start. Ten minutes later, you’re fatigued…but then you pick up the horn a couple of hours later and repeat the cycle. Before you know it, you’ve practiced two hours in one day. That’s what the pros do — and you can only do that for so many days in a row before you start sounding like a pro yourself. Now you’re in a virtuous cycle where you’re seeing such exciting results from your effort that you’re addicted to the process. You start picking up the trombone instead of looking to a screen to get your hit of dopamine.

This can happen for very young children, and it can happen on all kinds of things they’re not “supposed” to know how to do, like learning how to multiply, touch type, or solve Sudoku puzzles. All they need is time and mentorship.

We adults have a lot going on right now, but we can escape into hobbies, too. That moment when you’re clicking from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Facebook and back again? Yeah, go find something to do. Escape into something joyful — or at least potentially joyful. Stick with it long enough and consistently enough to find your footing, and your life will be the richer for it.

You and your kids can have meaningful experiences every day, even if you’re out of your routine, cut off from your community, and feeling a little scared and nervous. Art helps in the hard times, and creative thinking keeps us oriented toward solutions. When we have something to focus on and stimulate our minds besides reality, we are more content and better able to deal with our circumstances. Instead of dreading each day as something to get through, we anticipate a fresh opportunity to pursue an activity we’ve become passionate about. That’s a better way to live, no matter what’s happening in the world.

How are you spending your time as you shelter in place? What are you doing to manage anxiety? Please feel free to share in the comments.