Hobbies

Or

Right Use of Leisure

Or

Leisure – How to Use it

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What is This Life is full of Care?

Essay No. 01

We are living in a world dominated by industry and machinery.  Man, today, is so busy that he gets practically no leisure at all.  He is a slave to the revolving wheels and seconds. He wants so utilize every second, every minute, in making money.  He is dead to the beautiful panorama of natural beauty around him.  The flowing rivulets, the singing birds or the dancing daffodils do not attract him.  It is a tragic state of affairs.  It was this type of life that made W.H. Davies cry out in agony:

                “What is this life, it full of care,

                We have no time to stand and stare.”

                Nobody can deny the importance of leisure in life.  Rest is as important as work.  Since we have very little leisure in life today, we must know how to make the best use of it.  One must have some useful hobby to pursue in one’s leisure hours.  Leisure can, in that case, become a source of real pleasure.

                Hobby is an interesting pastime.  It is a pursuit which we undertake in leisure for pleasure and for profit.  The aim of hobby is not to earn money thought it may bring money indirectly.  But different people amuse themselves with different hobbies.  For example, my hobby may be story-writing whereas for another person it may be a profession.

                There are many kinds of hobbies.  One of them is collecting stamps and coins.  Some people collect flowers and leaves. Some like gardening and clay-modelling.  Some are fond of indoor games like chests and cards.  Young men like outdoor games such as cricket, hockey or football.  Hobbies not only provide pleasure but also educate the mind.

                I have two hobbies.  My first hobby is gardening. There is a big compound outside my house.  On one side, I have made a small garden.  I have made many beds of flowers.  In the spring season, my garden is full of beautiful flowers. I have a separate plot for vegetables—carrots , potatoes, etc.  I dig the earth with a space.  IN the evening, I water the plants and remove the weeds.  I sit under the trees and read my books.  It is very pleasant to sit there.

                My second hobby is photography.  I have small camera.  I take snaps of nearby sights.  I develop my photographs at my own place.  For this purpose, I have made a small dark room.  I send my photos to different papers and magazines, so I get some money.  Photography is a very paying hobby.  I want to paint life as it is.  I hope to succeed in this object.  I plan to arrange an exhibition of my photographs in the surrounding villages and cities.

                Recreation is not the only aim of hobbies.  They give us knowledge which we do not get from textbooks.  Besides being a mental tonic, hobbies are an excellent way of spending one’s leisure.  It is said that an idle mind is a devil’s workshop.  One should not, therefore, remain idle.

Essay No. 02

Hobbies

Hobbies are pursuits of spare time. They are followed when people are free from their routine occupational work. Hobbies are for pleasure, recreation and mental refreshment thus, a hobby is totally different from an occupation. An occupation is a source of income and sustenance. One earns ones bread and butter by following some trade or occupation. But hobbies are followed in spare time for their own sake. They are gainful but not in economical sense. They are never a source of earning money. That is why what might be an occupation for you, might be a hobby for me. You may be a professional football-player, but I may play football just for pleasure alone and no other consideration.

Hobbies are essential to keep us fit, refreshed and relaxed. Hobbies provide a welcome change and relief from routine a pursuit. Hobbies make our leisure fruitful, interesting and pleasant. If there are no hobbies, half the charm of the world’ would have been destroyed. Remember all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Hobbies have great recreational value. They save us from boredom? Dullness and mischief. An empty mind is devils workshop. If we are not engaged in some pleasant pursuit, we are likely to indulge in some kind of mischief. Hobbies provide us a valuable outlet to some of our creative and aesthetic urges, that is why they are so satisfying.

In these days of tension, turmoil, hectic economic activities and mad race for money, hobbies have become all the more significant. They can help us reduce tension, fatigue and many ailments related to them. One is fortunate if one has a couple of hobbies to keep oneself delightfully busy in some useful pursuit. There is nothing like hobbies to relieve us from our day to day worries, tension, mental fatigue and routine. Diversions are a psychological necessity. If there were no hobbies our store of energy would be soon exhausted, we would become too old to work efficiently even in our young days. The blessings which hobbies bestow on us are too numerous to be counted here in the limited space.

Hobbies are good for everybody, but they are a must for intellectuals and those who use their mental energies to earn their livelihood. After a day’s hard work, a hobby is a welcome and refreshing change. It comes like a delightful shower after a long sultry and scorching summer. Really, hobbies are very much rewarding. They are full of excitement, interest and fascination. At least for a while they take our mind off some vexing problem and provide valuable mental rest and peace. There is no compulsion of any kind in pursuing a hobby. You may proceed at your own pace and convenience.

There is an endless variety in hobbies. All the world is yours to chose from. Gardening, reading, singing, playing on some musical instrument, collecting stamps, bird-watching, keeping pets, collection of curios, photography, star-gazing, chess-playing, fishing, swimming, educating the adults, collecting autographs of eminent persons, writing, etc., are some of the well known hobbies. You can add many more to the list. You are free to invent your own hobby. There is no restriction in it. Every hobby has its own peculiarities, charms, advantages and pleasures. There are outdoor as well as indoor hobbies. You can choose any according to your taste, duration, liking of spare time and the amount of money you can afford.

You may choose gardening for your hobby. It is very interesting, you can have your own small garden full of fascinating plants, flowers, vegetables and fruit trees. It is said we are nearer God when we are in a garden. But you would be still nearer to God by being a gardener by hobby. The ennobling effect of flowers, plants, etc., can hardly be over emphasized. But for gardening as your hobby, you must have green fingers and also piece of vacant land for the purpose, or at least a suitable terrace or roof where you can have plants and creepers in pots. These days it is very difficult to possess a vacant piece of land. If you do you are really fortunate. Blooming flowers, their colours, sweet smells, the green of the plants, the different shapes, sizes, and colours of fruits and vegetables growing on the plants soothe our nerves, restore our peace of mind and give us a lot of creative satisfaction. You tend delicate, young and growing plants with great love and care, as you would a young baby. It gives great pleasure to see plants grow gradually into full and then unfold all their floral beauty.

Bonsai is very much in fashion these days, but to my mind it is nothing short of a cruelty. Is it not cruelty not to allow plants to grow and develop as they would do in normal conditions? Bonsai reminds me of ancient China when little girls were shod in wooden shoes so that their feet could not grow into their usual and beautiful ,shape and size. It was a height of perversity in the name of fashion.

Everybody has some spare time and leisure, however busy he or she might be. Now it depends on the person concerned how he or she utilizes that leisure time. Leisure can be devoted to some hobby to our great advantage. Hobbies make life fuller and more meaningful. They are meaningful and much desired escape from dull, drab, routine, matter-of-fact money- earning pursuits called occupations.

You can have stamp-collecting or philately as your leisure time occupation. It is also a very fascinating hobby. There is no end to the variety of stamps. And the story they tell is equally fascinating. But then it is a costly hobby. You can exchange stamps with your friends, etc., or you can become a member of a philatelist club. Stamps tell many things about the country they belong to. They tell about the culture, architecture, historical events and monuments, about the flora and fauna, great leaders and scientists, sports men and women, customs, traditions, festivals and what not. More often than not, they are issued to commemorate great national events, issues and things.

Collection of antiques is again a very rewarding and fascinating leisure time pursuit. Again it involves a lot of expenses. But if you have a will nothing can deter you from collecting antiques. There are many antiques available at moderate price to a discerning eye.

Essay No. 03

Hobbies

If happiness may be the hardest striving of an individual, hobbies present an easy track towards that goal. They form the valuable possession of every individual. If you cannot afford any other hobby, you can indulge in fanciful thinking and building castles in the air and can well adopt this excursion as a hobby. Although everyone has one or the other hobby, the need for it arises only after strenuous work. Every Englishman it is said rides hobby horse. The remark is significant. Englishmen work hard to make a living but they also find time to indulge in some hobby or the other. Just as all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, similarly if grown-up people are always engaged in their professional activities, their lives will become mechanical and monotonous. Professional work is done for the sake of money or profit, but a hobby is meant for pleasure alone. Regular professional work might entail great mental and physical strain but a hobby provides change and relaxation.

Hobbies can be of many types. Some are intellectual, others mainly physical. Some are expansive, others require little money. Again some require a lot of time others can be enjoyed even if the leisure at one’s disposal is little. Stamp collecting is a very common hobby, easy and not very expensive. Photography, on the other hand, can prove highly expensive for a person of average means. The hobby of fishing is rather inexpensive but it is such a tax on one’s time. An angler sits the whole day with his fishing line and hook by the river bank, dreaming and idling away the long hours. Fishing is really the hobby of an idler or one who has nothing else to do. Hunting is exciting and adventurous but novel-reading is equally exciting and enjoyable. Then there are exclusively indoor or near home hobbies of gardening, drawing and painting, reading, playing cards, seeing pictures and so on.

There is no hard and fast rule about the selection of a hobby. It all depends upon one’s taste, temperament and circumstances. Lovers of hard, outdoor activity would require physical strain. Intellectual people would probably like to spend their leisure in reading delightful books. Whichever hobby one chooses, it should be such as to provide relaxation and pleasure without taxing one’s time or purse too much.

Hobbies are sometimes side activities. They are intended to fill our leisure. They cannot be the main business in our life. Whether we attain a high degree of proficiency in our hobby or not, is really a matter of little significance. Success is it is welcome but failure does not matter either.. Many will not perhaps agree with this, for they say that we should do everything well. It is no use being mediocre even in our hobbies. This view-point has some strength. But the main point is that we cannot take a hobby too seriously. It loses its ‘purpose if it becomes a passion or an obsession. A person, who is crazy about his hobby, is a lopsided fellow. He does not know how to put each thing in its proper place. Life is real and life is earnest, as the poet says. Surely we cannot fritter away all the precious days of our life in riding a hobby horse too hard.

Hobbies and recreation, hard work and relaxation, can be properly understood only when people are educated and enlightened and they know the value of their time and attempt to make most of it. Actually those who have more than one interest in life will realize the importance of hobbies, sports, travel and other similar activities. Unfortunately the average man’s standard of living is so low and his general awakening so poor that he has very few interests in life, except earning his bread and producing children.

Essay No. 04

Hobbies

There is much more to our lives than mere existence. Pleasure and amusement are as important to us as survival is. Our occupations often only help us earn the money we need to live; they do not always by themselves, provide us either happiness or relaxation. Moreover, since we cannot work continuously, lest monotony and fatigue should affect us, we must allow ourselves periods of leisure between work schedules. In other words, work and leisure should take turns in our lives.

Leisure enables us an opportunity to regain the energy that we expend while working, as well as to distract our attention from regular work. Engaging ourselves in healthy hobbies is a useful way of utilizing leisure, Hobbies should serve as alternate occupations that would restore to us our enthusiasm for routine work.

We should choose our hobbies in line with our interests and attitudes. Our choices depend on our tastes, talents and temperament, as well as our age and financial position. To avoid monotony, we may change hobbies as we age, or alternatively, may have a few hobbies to pursue in turns. As there are a large number of hobbies, which vary from the simple and cheap to the complex and expensive, often our choice of hobbies depends on how much time and money we can spare for them.

Common among the hobbies which are pursued are, collecting of postage stamps and objects of art, like paintings, sculptures and curios; photography; reading; gardening; painting and different handicrafts; as well as activities that involve physical exertion, like travelling, hiking, mountaineering, canoeing and other adventure sports. But however varied the hobbies might be, each of them should provide satisfaction to the person pursuing it.

Even though hobbies are generally meant to be recreational, some of them educate those that pursue them. A person collecting stamps of different countries will have a unique insight of these countries. Information about culture, natural resources, famous personalities, physical features and people, that postage stamps provide, may be in a fragmented or incoherent manner. Nevertheless, such information will be useful in a modest way to improve one’s knowledge about the outside world. Photography is another hobby, which, besides being educative, can also be developed as a successful form of art. While photographs of scenery and people’s lifestyles can educate us about the rich variety and beauty of our world, the practice and innovation of the techniques of photography can help us develop it as a popular form of art. Though travelling by itself enjoys the status of a hobby, enabling us to gain first-hand knowledge about people and places, it also complements photography to the benefit of each other. The diversity of the world can be recorded on photographs only if we travel to different locations worldwide. Reading in another hobby that can be very useful in educating people. It is relatively passive in nature, but is capable of providing satisfaction to those who pursue it.

Hobbies like gardening, painting or drawing are aimed more at providing amusement and relaxation. They do not so much educate us as they help us develop skills. Practising such hobbies may in certain cases help us discover our latent talents, which can be productively developed. The mastery over art, which well-known artists have, probably had its beginning in the hobbies they pursued.

Yet another category of hobbies, which include watching entertainment programmes on television, playing card games and seeing films, serve only as pastimes. It is not advisable to choose them, because indulging in them too much may make us addicted to them.

Hobbies, as they are meant to provide relaxation, should be practised only in leisure. They are meant to complement our regular work, not to replace it. Work and hobbies have different aims. They serve their aims best only if their priorities are not confused. Hobbies should be motivated by our tastes and need for satisfaction; not by the desire for success or achievement. In other words, hobbies should not be our obsession.

Obviously, hobbies will be useful only if people are educated and gainfully employed. In India, where much of the population lives in misery and poverty, it is doubtful whether hobbies have much relevance. Hopefully, as we progress, they will find a place among our priorities.