freedom to start
beauty of impermanence and hobbies [84]:
Over the years, it seems like I am constantly picking up my hobbies: writing, running, and reading after some random breaks. I have a certain degree of shame about it. How is it months since I last ran past 10K, read significantly fewer books last year than the year before, or haven’t published once a week on Substack since the end of 2022?
Yet I still picked them up again. There was friction initially but not long until I got in the groove and enjoyed those activities. The flipped side of the coin is you can start and stop hobbies at any point. They are not jobs where you attend meetings and complete assignments because your livelihood depends on it. Hobbies are meant to be enjoyable and/or a practice to train your diligence and consistency, optionally.
I have been working on the notion of “showing up for myself first”. The point is to build self-confidence by consistently completing things I say I will do. I practice this with activities where I have the option to quit without immediate repercussions. In a way, it is easier to do a day job because I have no choice. It is when I am learning a new language, practicing a sport, or training for an optional race that I have the freedom to follow through or drop it on my own will.
In “How to Focus”, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about impermanence, and how it makes transformation possible:
Thanks to impermanance we can change suffering into joy. When we practice the art of mindful living, then when things change, we won’t have any regrets.
Impermanence is not a negative note in the song of life. If there were no impermanence, life would be impossible.
This reminder diverted me away from the tempting self-shaming and self-antagonizing for being lazy and irresponsible with hobbies. Impermanence means change is constant. I could turn things around and pick up the things I left a while ago at any point.
In the pursuit of finding “the thing” that is not my job to commit to, I took a trip down memory lane on how I learned English as a Vietnamese native speaker many years ago. I realize I either forget or underestimate how much time and work it takes to master new skills.
I went to my first English class when I was 6. When I came to the US for college at 18, I continued to learn as I immersed myself in an English-speaking world. I learned from the classroom, my dorm mates, and student organizations. I learned to speak “American”. After eight years, having worked at three American companies, and half a dozen jobs, I still frequently learn new slang and expressions. My journey to English mastery brought me many opportunities and it brought me there because I stuck with it for more than a decade, day in and day out. I like language learning and I like English so I paid more attention to it than Maths or Physics. Nevertheless, even when my baseline interest in a subject was higher, I didn’t achieve mastery purely out of interest. I spent enough time training and revising again and again. I learned the language upside down, inside out, in six different ways and taught by no less than twenty teachers over the years.
You don’t learn by reading something once and memorizing it. You learn by repetition, rinse, and repeat. When I was in elementary school, I remember some fun days of taking weekend English classes because I had two close friends with me. We were the three musketeers snickering together for eight months in a row. As a kid, it was one of the best experiences. But those eight months were a drop in the bucket in the eleven years of learning. I had been to classes where the atmosphere felt tense or I would fret going because I was shy and the teacher made us do a lot of speaking exercises. I didn’t love going then but I didn’t have a choice. My mom made sure I showed up to my classes anyway.
The journey to mastery is filled with unglamorous and unexciting days. They are ordinary and boring, where I more likely than not showed up out of obligation. I did like English - I liked watching American movies, reading books, and entertainment in English. I was obsessed with Disney Channel when they put it on cable in fifth grade. Hannah Montana posters were plastered on my wall, and my love for those forms of art/shows/music pushed me to be patient and perseverant in my studies. There was an aspect of interest but consistency helps me learn and improve.
I think it’s a myth these days to declare "to do what you love” without giving proper caveats. The better way might be to train and realize if you like something or not. How do you know whether you love a subject if you barely spend time working on it? You might have an interest but to take an interest into something bigger than a fantasy takes years. I revisit this post by
often, in which she captures the essence of hobbies precisely. Hobbies take work and are sustainably enjoyable when you put in the time. On the other hand, passive but “fun” acts like watching TV or scrolling on social media might feel entertaining to indulge in but are not sustainably good for us.My favorite singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo recently shared “Quantity over quality with songwriting sometimes” and that made me think a lot. For most of us, we need to sift through the bad, silly, low-quality disappointing stuff before we can get to the good stuff - ideas, songs, essays, training sessions, products, projects, etc.
How much of our lives pass us by when we don’t work on a skill or knowledge long enough? Either we think we are too old, a subject is too daunting, or everyone else is so much ahead of us. I have my fair share of regrets about not being consistent. One of them is not learning the piano properly. I thought I was late when I started at 12 and was on and off with practice for six years. Then it was learning French, which I started in 2020 and abandoned out of the lack of necessity. The years passed by and I am not good at either subject. I overwhelm myself with how much work and time-consuming certain things take but I can’t change the fact that time will pass anyway. Better to make use of it rather than just let it slip through your fingers.
Alas, we have the agency to commence or continue. We are constantly at the mercy of progress and regress. Making a step forward today means casting a vote for a version of future you and vice versa. Lucky for us, there is an option to restart whenever we stop. But we have only many days and we are only ever as young as we are today. So choose wisely.
Thank you for reading the Life with MD publication and I hope you enjoy this essay.
I am interested in your journey of trying things and keeping at them. Have you started or have kept a hobby, project, or business? How did you make it a habit? What worked and didn’t? Please let me know your experiences in the comments!
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Lovely writing Minh.
'The journey to mastery is filled with unglamorous and unexciting days'
Agree! And yet the end result of putting in the work is a tangible skill which can bring a lot of joy
That bit about a day job being easier is so true. I sit down and write/edit my novel before anything else for at least an hour and a half each morning and 99% of the time it’s really hard and I have to force myself to focus. It would be so much easier to just switch to work mode. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately so it was nice to see someone voicing it!