What is a Year Good For? Hobbies!
In her latest essay “Give It a Year,” L.L. Barkat talks about what a difference a year can make when it’s focused on one thing in particular. Having experienced a year fixed in one place, she looks forward to how she can do “more time”:
One year for a visual art pilgrimage. A year exploring dance. Twelve months for tea and now twelve for music and bread. It doesn’t matter anymore what the reviewers say. Give it a year? I’m in.
A year has always been my personal focus on a hobby. Or to put it another way: I like to collect hobbies, so my wife implores me to focus on one per year. It works well.
A year for gourmet cooking. A year for baking. A year for simple canning. A year to get more complicated with canning. And now a year for brewing. Next year is starting to make charcuterie.
What kind of hobbies would you want to focus a whole year on?
I really enjoyed and was inspired by this essay. The idea of giving a hobby a year; the idea of narrowing the goals for a year to one or two, rather than having a long list of Things I Wish I’d Actually Do. A year makes tasks seem doable, goals accomplishable. For me, the coming year will be for embroidery. And perhaps for cooking through one specific cookbook – maybe the Tupelo Honey Cookbook out of Asheville, NC.
This essay also got me thinking about my reading. My reading list is always long, and I’m always surrounded by books I wish I’d get through (or to). And that includes print magazine subscriptions. I think I’m going to subscribe to one – and one only – print magazine this year. I’ll have to think about which one and choose carefully, and then when it comes in the mail, I’ll know what to focus on, and I’ll relish it.
Wow. That print magazine subscription idea is brilliant. I don’t think I could limit it to one, but maybe two or three…
Hm. My only problem with this philosophy (as a serial, semi-obsessive generalist) is that hobbies tend to be expensive. And after cultivating a year’s worth of experience and expertise, it’s hard to give up the tools of the trade, only to buy new ones.
It’s the accumulation and buying that’s troublesome…
I think it depends on the hobby, Jake. For something like baking or crocheting the tools are cheap. If you want to learn an instrument every year or go from mountain biking to canoeing to kayaking then, yes, that could get pretty expensive (and you might not be able to fit it all in your place of residence).
What would you do to make sure your hobby expenses didn’t spiral out of control?