Get a hobby

by | Dec 30, 2016 | Develop yourself

I think I mentioned a while ago that I went to hear Dr Norman Swan from ABC Radio National talk about the components of men’s good health. He mentioned that there were four important things to mix up a well balanced “men’s soup”.

In this order, they were:

  1. social interaction
  2. exercise
  3. diet
  4. and, surprisingly, get a hobby.

Well I’m doing most of the first three fairly well but unfortunately I’m not starring too well on number 4, the matter of a Hobby.

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In fact I was out bike riding with a bunch of my mates the other day and went round the table and asked about their hobbies. Out of 10 of them there was only one who could say that they had a hobby. Yet a hobby is a very important component of a balanced life because it gets you away from everything else you’re doing.

And it can’t be something you are doing already really. For instance, some of the boys said bike riding was their hobby. No, it’s not! That’s part of their exercise. So reading could be a hobby, they claimed. Well, no, because generally you do that as part of the everyday routine.

I am motivated to choose at least one hobby because my great namesake, Winston Churchill, reckoned that having a hobby was very important.

“To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real,” he said.

And he pursued that belief. You will remember he loved bricklaying and built lots of walls and a swimming pool, for heaven’s sake! He was a painter as well… a very accomplished painter who had more than 40 paintings hung by the Royal Academy.

Currently I am thinking about gardening and model railways.

I’m not doing too well about the model trains (although I had some trains in a shed about thirty years ago until unfortunately I burnt the shed down when I spit roasted a pig in the shed on a total fire ban day!) but at least I’ve got some tomatoes plants that look really healthy.

So perhaps I’ll be well setup for the New Year with a hobby.

However, the point of all of this is to suggest that you increase the balance in your life and get yourself to a hobby for the New Year. Something to get you away from the hum drum of everything else you’re doing so your brain and body play on a different field occasionally.