We don’t outgrow the things we love, not like a plant outgrows the pot its in. These things simply fall away from us when we no longer need them. Less like a too-small shirt and more like pine needles that drop off in the winter. They can always grow back. I can always pick up a pen again, dig out my old knitting needles, find my old buckets of polymer clay.
Not gone. The memory is still in my hands, in my heart, I can pick up the tools and go again whenever I want. Even so, there’s no point in ignoring the cycles in which these old hobbies simply stop being relevant.
I’ve never stopped writing, but I’ve picked up and dropped a number of other hobbies over the years. Some for the cost of entry — ceramics, sculpting, woodburning, leatherworking, jewelry making — and others because my mind moves on to something else. I’ve been into witchcraft, medical history, theoretical physics, historical epidemiology. At one point in middle school, I spent a solid six months doing nothing but researching the sinking of the Titanic.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a writer. I keep coming back to these things I loved, pulling facts out of the back of my mind from fixations years gone. When I write, I take myself back into the stories these old hobbies told.
In the Titanic, I hear the stories of people who drowned. The cruelty of cold water, and the frozen beautiful night.
In Ashfall Fossil Beds, I learn the way resilience writes itself in your bones at the end of the world. All rough edges and gray mud.
In Crochet, I know the value of easy repetition. Knot after stitch until a blanket covers my lap. Cover my friends.
In Writing, I teach myself how to tell you these things.
from the pen of icarus blake 
Leave a comment