A hobby is something that, not so long ago, I assumed I had long grown out of the need for.
Like Magic Step Shoes and Sylvanian Familes, the necessity had simply diminished - swept under the carpet of more pressing uses of time, energy and money.
The only problem I’ve found, with what is potentially just another depressingly relatable trope of getting older, is that as easy as it may be to take the girl out of the hobby… the hobby is less readily removed from the girl!
All that piano-shaped enthusiasm and passion, it never fully extinguishes. Not really!
Instead, it simply gets stowed away somewhere so cellular, that its only hope of ever being rediscovered, rests in the chance and fateful hands of a mid-life epiphany.
The epiphany that those ‘unimportant’ extra-curriculars (the ones that were forfeited for teenage nights out and shopping expeditions) - they DO matter after all.
For mindfulness, escapism, creativity - identity-reinforcement.
Only now that I have resumed my childhood musical hobby, can I appreciate the pitfalls of a lifestyle lacking in any activity, whose purpose is ‘just because….’
Activities where the only answer to that… ‘to what end?’ question is, quite simply, enrichment.
Piano, for the last 5 months, had been THAT activity.
I’m under no illusion, that the next Myleene Klass, I most certainly will never (ever) be.
However, re-learning the piano basics, and mastering a bit of Lady Gaga while I’m at it, has itched a creative scratch that work and everyday life was apparently only tickling the surface of.
Not only this, it has proved strangely comforting, in the way that nostalgic things so often are. The chance to travel back in time, via the medium of a somewhat-rusty arpeggio, to those halcyon Daddy-daughter moments of the early 90s, when my then-capacity for rolled chords, would never fail to hit a proud parent note!
A note that can still be felt, if not heard, to this 30-years later day!
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