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Sport and Competition
Two Sports and a Hobby?
Diversify your passions for protection as you age
Posted February 23, 2019
Long ago, when my daughter was in high school and applying for college, she had a friend in the same situation whose father insisted on a strict formula for success. Two sports and a hobby was what he thought you needed to get into Harvard. So the girl played the violin and did lacrosse and soccer. I don't know if she got into Harvard. Our family joked about this formula for years, wondering why not 2 hobbies and a sport? Or 3 of either. Is dressage a sport or a hobby? How about competition obedience or rally for dogs?
We played with this meme for decades, and now I see the wisdom. Now that I'm over 65 and have dark days, those habits of yore are keeping me going. I learned Tai Chi before going to Costa Rica. Is Tai Chi a sport or a hobby? I don't know, but it has become a mainstay of life once more. We have been snowed in for two weeks. Glaciers are falling off the roof, and the roads are unsafe. At times the power has gone out. What to do? Well, I remembered my Tai Chi practice and have been doing it daily. The photo posted here is of my teacher. Master Jun Yang, to whom I bow in gratitude.
In college, I made a transition from playing piano (badly) to playing the harpsichord. It fit my little hands. Now that those hands are arthritic, playing the harpsichord is a form of physical therapy, but it does double duty as mental stimulation and joy.
Sports and hobbies are like pennies or even half dollars in your life piggy bank. When times get rough, or you are sick or dealing with the multiple pains of aging, those investments of time and energy that may have seemed spurious in the past can become valuable sources of happiness. Although I had practiced Tai Chi for 5 years, I had left it behind, though it was a flash in the pan. Now it has become an essential daily practice, good for muscles and mind.
My husband has always practiced athleticism and scholarship. When he was young he ran marathons and climbed all the "snow cones," the glaciated mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Now he works out on an elliptical for an hour a day and then reads and writes. Two sports, and two ... what do you call deep reading? What do you call writing books and articles, sometimes gratis and sometimes for money? We read Ulysses with commentaries multiple times, and we spent about two weeks on a car trip reading Nabokov's Pale Fire with Brian Boyd's commentary. Now we are approaching Gravity's Rainbow with a commentary. Is reading literature a hobby? Or a sport? It is 760 pages and weighs about 5 pounds in our 1973 edition. Reading it, along with a guide, is a hobby but hefting it is a sport.
So snowed in, aging and arthritic, we draw on the experiences of youth to keep us joyous. and fit. Whether you have 2 sports and a hobby, or 2 hobbies and a sport, I think the take-home lesson is similar to the guidance we hear from financial managers: diversify!
