We live in the 21st century and we are the busiest people alive in the universe! Yes, modern life has picked up so much speed that there is rarely enough time for us to stop and marvel at the luxurious lives we are living at the moment. This fast pace has surely helped us advance at a rapid rate, but it has also ended up costing us a major part of our sanity.
There is hardly anything that seems to pleasure us nowadays. What’s worse is the fact that we have also completely surrendered ourselves to the trap of consumerism. We try to find peace and satisfaction in the multiplicity of colorful brands that lighten up the roadways and our television screens. It can be anything from a particular brand of fast food to a specific brand of merchandise. All of it has been used and is being used for the purpose of self-satiety, but none of it has been able to keep its consumers engaged for long. They always end up craving for another item they noticed in some advertisement elsewhere.
The most possible solution to all of this would be some inward introspection. We need not look at the outside world in order to understand what we want, instead we have to look deep within ourselves to find what we really need. It is time that we try to find out our lost hobbies from childhood, and if there had been none in the past we should work on creating something new at present.
Numismatics or the study and collection of currency is a famous hobby all around the globe. Many children from all over the world start with numismatics as their primary hobby. It is fun and interesting at the same time. For starters, you get to see and touch currency notes and coins from all over the world! There are moments when you may even feel that you have a trove full of riches. Moreover, starting anew with this hobby might prove to be more fruitful now as you are a grown-up. You are bound to have more access to people hailing from foreign countries; your collection will surely increase with time.
The next hobby is another famous activity from all around the globe. In fact, this is so famous that it has a distinct field of study as well. It is philately, and philately stands for the study and collection of postage stamps. Every country in the world makes use of postage stamps in order to send hand-written letters through the post. Yes, even though our planet is ruled by the presence of emails, posts and letters and postage stamps have not run out of use yet. The best part about collecting postage stamps as a hobby is to be able to find out the different places and monuments of admiration and adulation in different countries all over the world. Postage stamps can also be based on famous people in history. And most importantly, they are so colourful that they captivate your eyes!
Go back to reading! Reading might have been your favourite hobby when you were a child. Do you feel nostalgic on a rainy afternoon, sitting beside your office window, and wondering about the time when you were young, without any worry in the world… when the afternoons of your summer vacations were filled with volumes of Malory Towers or Harry Potter? If you do feel a quaint pain on remembering those moments then it is time that you go back to your habit of reading. Keep a little part of your day fixed for your book. It can be right after you return from work or better still the single hour you have after your dinner and before going to sleep. Yes, you will need to do away with your habit of watching shows on Netflix, YouTube or working late into the night, but it will help you take care of yourself, which is the most important thing.
There are a variety of other hobbies you can resort to, but it is always important to remember the basic need to take up a hobby – taking care of the self. Nothing is more important than the self. The more you focus on self-management and self-growth the more you will be effective in other parts of your life.
Explore, explore, explore. Till you find what you love doing. Go on. What are you waiting for?
Written By Paul Palathingal
Week 11, March 2021
