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The Waxing and Waning of Leisure Pursuits
Dec. 30th, 2019 03:54 pmWhat are your main hobbies, interests and passions in life? And how have they changed over time?
When I was a kid of about 9 or 10 or 11, I used to enjoy stamp collecting, as did at least half the other kids I knew. There was even a radio show on Saturday mornings devoted to matters philatelic. In those days, as I recall, we even had mail delivered on Saturday mornings - to our doors - unless of course the posties were on strike. I used to belong to a subscription service that sent me a selection of stamps each month, on approval, together with a price list. I'd pick the ones I wanted and send the rest back, together with a money order (from the post office) to cover the cost of the stamps I was keeping. That worked out OK until the stamp company decided I would have to buy a minimum amount each month if I wanted to stay on their mailing list. And whatever that minimum amount was - probably only a dollar or two, but those dollars went a lot further in those days - I decided it was too rich for my blood and cancelled my subscription. Then they sent a letter suggesting maybe I'd like to collect coins? But although I did indeed take an interest in coins, I was done with "on approval" services of that kind. However, I still followed the series "Is there a fortune in your pocket?" in the weekend magazine (remember those?) that came with the newspaper.
Do kids still collect stamps and coins these days? I'm sure some do, although snail mail and cash are definitely less popular than they once were. For me, collecting stamps sparked my interest in other countries, other languages and other cultures. And as I got a little older, I acquired pen pals too. I had pen pals in Japan and (West) Germany and though we exchanged letters quite regularly during my high school years, we did lose touch after that and we never met in person, or over the phone for that matter. I wonder how all that would have unfolded if we had had access to e-mail, Skype and social media back then? I do recall one of my Japanese pen pals sending me a cassette once, so I could actually hear what she sounded like - but that was as high-tech as we ever got.
Children do still participate in sports (whether team or individual), take art lessons and learn to play musical instruments. Parents often want their children to pick one thing and stick to it for at least a year or two, and from their perspective that certainly makes sense. After all, they have a substantial investment in terms of time, money and emotion. They may have to purchase or rent an instrument, pay for lessons and equipment that is constantly outgrown or outworn, shuttle kids to the rink at 4 AM or whatever ungodly hour they can get the ice time... well, you get the picture. The children, on the other hand, are very much at an exploratory stage. Everything is new to them and they need to figure out if this is the instrument or the sport or the hobby for them. If they do instantly take to it, that's usually a good thing - unless of course it takes over their life to the point that they neglect their health, schoolwork, friends and family and all the other important things in life. If they don't take to it, that's complicated too: is it that they'd really be better off doing something else or is it that they're doing something they would normally enjoy and have a talent for but they get tired of the endless practising, dislike their coach or teacher or other members of the group or aren't working at an appropriate level? When should parents follow the children's overt expressions of interest and when should they encourage the children to pursue something they haven't yet shown any interest in? If something doesn't seem to be going well, when should parents step in and what should they do? To what extent should they encourage kids to learn stuff on their own and to what extent should they enrol them in formal lessons? It's quite the minefield for families to navigate!
I started taking piano lessons when I was eight. It was a fairly easy transition because I had just moved to a new school just across the street from the house where my brother was already taking lessons. I continued with those lessons with the same teacher at the same house for nine years and three more schools, stopping only when I attended university. It was overall a good experience. Private lessons worked well for me but my experience with group lessons was, shall we say, mixed. I started weekly recorder lessons around the same time as I started piano. The teacher was great - he later went on to form the Huggett Family Players - but the group was not the most enthusiastic one. By the end of the year, we were being persuaded to "graduate" to another instrument and the one that was being pushed was the violin. Suffice it to say that the violin was NOT really my instrument, though it didn't help that the teacher was badly overburdened and not very effective. I did dust off my recorder (and buy a couple of new ones) during my years at Carleton, where I found a new group to play with; I also later inherited my brother's collection of recorders and cornetti as well as his harpsichord.
In my teens I became interested in the sitar and Ravi Shankar and my dad actually brought me back one during a business trip that took him through India. I still think about taking a few lessons on that, although I suspect I'll never get around to it. Like many teens of my generation (and no doubt other generations too), I wanted a guitar - which I got for one of my birthdays (a sort of entry-level acoustic guitar which I still have) but only on condition that I take lessons at the Y. So I went through a summer of weekly group lessons geared to teens; they were OK people but most of them had never studied music before and I really didn't learn much there. What I did learn was mostly through buying music books, going through them on my own and practising with friends, listening to my 45s and picking out the chords on various favourite song ... etc. This was before I was burdened with summer jobs and the like, so I had a fair amount of time to play. It did convince my mother that I was serious about guitar but then she started making noises about how she got the sense that I'd really like to take more lessons... and I got rather antsy because it started to seem too much like work! She never really did seem to "get" the idea of just hanging out or going to "be-ins" or drop-in-centres like most of us were into in those days. Or maybe she DID get it and figured we'd all be too much into sex and drugs and rock and roll - who knows? The generation gap has always been with us, I guess.
My daughter at various times has taken up a lot of things - at first we just signed her up for stuff we thought she'd enjoy, like dance lessons and pre-school music and arts and crafts and Brownies but from the time she was around eight, we were taking her cue from her and the various activities she learned about through school. She did gymnastics and fencing and voice and keyboard lessons at the Barrhaven music school and generally kept busy at things of her own choosing. Mind you, she was an only child and there weren't a lot of other children close to her age in the neighbourhood, so to a great extent she had to carve out her own social life! With her children, things are a little different. Her three kids live within walking distance of their school and there seem to be lots of other kids in the area, as well as parks and community centres.
Now that I'm retired, I have some free time but I'm back to being a dabbler in this and that. That's not so much because I don't know what I like or want to do yet (as it might have been when I was younger) - it's more that there are lots of things I'd like to try, but I know there aren't enough hours in the day or years in my lifetime to do them all! I'll probably never get really good at any one thing, and that's OK.
When I was a kid of about 9 or 10 or 11, I used to enjoy stamp collecting, as did at least half the other kids I knew. There was even a radio show on Saturday mornings devoted to matters philatelic. In those days, as I recall, we even had mail delivered on Saturday mornings - to our doors - unless of course the posties were on strike. I used to belong to a subscription service that sent me a selection of stamps each month, on approval, together with a price list. I'd pick the ones I wanted and send the rest back, together with a money order (from the post office) to cover the cost of the stamps I was keeping. That worked out OK until the stamp company decided I would have to buy a minimum amount each month if I wanted to stay on their mailing list. And whatever that minimum amount was - probably only a dollar or two, but those dollars went a lot further in those days - I decided it was too rich for my blood and cancelled my subscription. Then they sent a letter suggesting maybe I'd like to collect coins? But although I did indeed take an interest in coins, I was done with "on approval" services of that kind. However, I still followed the series "Is there a fortune in your pocket?" in the weekend magazine (remember those?) that came with the newspaper.
Do kids still collect stamps and coins these days? I'm sure some do, although snail mail and cash are definitely less popular than they once were. For me, collecting stamps sparked my interest in other countries, other languages and other cultures. And as I got a little older, I acquired pen pals too. I had pen pals in Japan and (West) Germany and though we exchanged letters quite regularly during my high school years, we did lose touch after that and we never met in person, or over the phone for that matter. I wonder how all that would have unfolded if we had had access to e-mail, Skype and social media back then? I do recall one of my Japanese pen pals sending me a cassette once, so I could actually hear what she sounded like - but that was as high-tech as we ever got.
Children do still participate in sports (whether team or individual), take art lessons and learn to play musical instruments. Parents often want their children to pick one thing and stick to it for at least a year or two, and from their perspective that certainly makes sense. After all, they have a substantial investment in terms of time, money and emotion. They may have to purchase or rent an instrument, pay for lessons and equipment that is constantly outgrown or outworn, shuttle kids to the rink at 4 AM or whatever ungodly hour they can get the ice time... well, you get the picture. The children, on the other hand, are very much at an exploratory stage. Everything is new to them and they need to figure out if this is the instrument or the sport or the hobby for them. If they do instantly take to it, that's usually a good thing - unless of course it takes over their life to the point that they neglect their health, schoolwork, friends and family and all the other important things in life. If they don't take to it, that's complicated too: is it that they'd really be better off doing something else or is it that they're doing something they would normally enjoy and have a talent for but they get tired of the endless practising, dislike their coach or teacher or other members of the group or aren't working at an appropriate level? When should parents follow the children's overt expressions of interest and when should they encourage the children to pursue something they haven't yet shown any interest in? If something doesn't seem to be going well, when should parents step in and what should they do? To what extent should they encourage kids to learn stuff on their own and to what extent should they enrol them in formal lessons? It's quite the minefield for families to navigate!
I started taking piano lessons when I was eight. It was a fairly easy transition because I had just moved to a new school just across the street from the house where my brother was already taking lessons. I continued with those lessons with the same teacher at the same house for nine years and three more schools, stopping only when I attended university. It was overall a good experience. Private lessons worked well for me but my experience with group lessons was, shall we say, mixed. I started weekly recorder lessons around the same time as I started piano. The teacher was great - he later went on to form the Huggett Family Players - but the group was not the most enthusiastic one. By the end of the year, we were being persuaded to "graduate" to another instrument and the one that was being pushed was the violin. Suffice it to say that the violin was NOT really my instrument, though it didn't help that the teacher was badly overburdened and not very effective. I did dust off my recorder (and buy a couple of new ones) during my years at Carleton, where I found a new group to play with; I also later inherited my brother's collection of recorders and cornetti as well as his harpsichord.
In my teens I became interested in the sitar and Ravi Shankar and my dad actually brought me back one during a business trip that took him through India. I still think about taking a few lessons on that, although I suspect I'll never get around to it. Like many teens of my generation (and no doubt other generations too), I wanted a guitar - which I got for one of my birthdays (a sort of entry-level acoustic guitar which I still have) but only on condition that I take lessons at the Y. So I went through a summer of weekly group lessons geared to teens; they were OK people but most of them had never studied music before and I really didn't learn much there. What I did learn was mostly through buying music books, going through them on my own and practising with friends, listening to my 45s and picking out the chords on various favourite song ... etc. This was before I was burdened with summer jobs and the like, so I had a fair amount of time to play. It did convince my mother that I was serious about guitar but then she started making noises about how she got the sense that I'd really like to take more lessons... and I got rather antsy because it started to seem too much like work! She never really did seem to "get" the idea of just hanging out or going to "be-ins" or drop-in-centres like most of us were into in those days. Or maybe she DID get it and figured we'd all be too much into sex and drugs and rock and roll - who knows? The generation gap has always been with us, I guess.
My daughter at various times has taken up a lot of things - at first we just signed her up for stuff we thought she'd enjoy, like dance lessons and pre-school music and arts and crafts and Brownies but from the time she was around eight, we were taking her cue from her and the various activities she learned about through school. She did gymnastics and fencing and voice and keyboard lessons at the Barrhaven music school and generally kept busy at things of her own choosing. Mind you, she was an only child and there weren't a lot of other children close to her age in the neighbourhood, so to a great extent she had to carve out her own social life! With her children, things are a little different. Her three kids live within walking distance of their school and there seem to be lots of other kids in the area, as well as parks and community centres.
Now that I'm retired, I have some free time but I'm back to being a dabbler in this and that. That's not so much because I don't know what I like or want to do yet (as it might have been when I was younger) - it's more that there are lots of things I'd like to try, but I know there aren't enough hours in the day or years in my lifetime to do them all! I'll probably never get really good at any one thing, and that's OK.
