Losing grip – No(t) time to hobby
Yo fellas! I think we all know that this hobby can help us through tough times. It’s quite likely it has seen a couple of you readers make it out of a bad place, or at least someone you know of. At times everyone needs a place where the mind is safe and can wander freely, and a good hobby provides that.
It certainly does for me. Hands and fingers work, mind either goes elsewhere. Or is intensively focused on the task at hand, depending on which aspect of the hobby I’m engaging with. Mounting Vanquish beadlocks – mind goes on vacation. Wiring third channel to simultaneously change dragbrake, diff lock and gear on a crawler – mind is very much on the job.
That’s why we all like and have hobbies, right? They give us a break.
However, there are also times to give our hobby a break. I dare say it is probably just as important to recognise this, as it is to recognize when we need our pastime. At least if we want to keep our wife, girlfriend, job or whatever else is important to us.
I would like to think that you have noticed my abscense from BigSquid over the last couple of months. Something like a five months hiatus with no columns from me – unprecedented! How come? At the core of it: because I am a person.
RC and philosophy combined – now you truly know I’m back! Consider the following:
Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are.*
How beautiful! In other words: while I want to wrench on my Vanquish VS4-10, I also want to be a someone who prioritizes family and friends over my own interests. In fact, I want that (being a better person) more, than I want to enjoy my hobby. Hence, I choose to forgo my own immediate desires (wrenching and painting), to instead pursue my overarching goals of providing for and taking care of my family. The fancy term for this is that I have second-order volitions, desires of what I want to want. Which is why I didn’t throw my children through the window (without opening it first) when they got on my nerves as babies.
I wanted to do it, but even more I wanted to be a better man than that. Not killing my own children is setting the bar pretty low, I know, but sleepless nights and screaming children really brings out the worst in me. Gotta start somewhere.
That’s it. Were I an animal, I would have stuck to my hobby and kept writing colums for BigSquid even when work and moving between continents occupied most of my time. However, I am a Person. An entity with the capability of reflecting over my desires, and then choosing not to follow my impulses. Hence, no columns for five months or so. Now things are different, and I’m back again hoping to entertain you on a regular basis, and on occasion maybe even bend your mind a little.
Now go support your hobby, buy something. Trusting Cubby, I believe this might be that particular time when you should follow your impulses rather than listening to your second order volitions…
* Quoted from “Freedom of the will and the concept of a person” by Harry G Frankfurt, Journal of Philosophy, 1971. Funny thing that this hobby made me read it once more.
