My Life Is My Hobby
People occasionally ask me what my hobbies are. It comes up in those conversations where two people are trying to establish fairly quickly what sort of person they are dealing with.
I have never been very good at answering.
Not because I have none. Quite the opposite. I swim, I read, I write, I travel, I have become interested in philosophy, history, films, political events, people I meet by accident, and subjects of which, three days earlier, I knew absolutely nothing. Some of these interests stay with me for years, others disappear after a week, and occasionally I try something only to discover that I do not like it at all.
That seems useful too.
What I have never felt much need to do is turn these things into identities. I swim, but I do not particularly think of myself as a swimmer. I ride a motorcycle, but I do not feel obliged to become a motorcyclist. I read philosophy and literature more than is probably reasonable, but even here I hesitate to call reading my hobby.
Perhaps the difficulty lies partly in the word itself. A hobby sounds like a fenced-off section of life. There is work, there is family, there are obligations, and then, somewhere to the side, there is a little recreational compartment where one keeps cycling, photography, hiking, cooking, tennis, or reading.
I have never quite experienced life that way.
I realize that sounds suspiciously like something one might print underneath a photograph of a sunset, and I distrust such sentences on principle, particularly when they come from myself. But I mean something fairly ordinary by it. I am interested in what happens while I am alive.
That interest has perhaps become more noticeable to me with age. I am fifty-five now. This is an objective fact, although subjectively it still feels somewhat implausible. When I look at photographs, I can see what time has done. Obviously I do not look the way I did at thirty.
Yet when I am sitting in the bathtub, I do not particularly feel fifty-five. Nor do I feel twenty. Twenty has become another country. But thirty does not seem very far away. I am simply sitting there being myself, apparently without ever having received the internal memorandum announcing that I am now the fifty-five-year-old edition.
Of course, the body knows better. The body is less philosophical about these things. It keeps records.
But there is another kind of ageing that interests me more because it does not proceed according to the calendar. I sometimes think of it as fossilization.
I know people in their seventies who still seem somehow unfinished, and I mean that as praise. Something in them remains available to alteration. They can still be surprised. A conversation can disturb an opinion. Somebody can suggest something foolish and, instead of immediately explaining why it will not work, they become curious.
And I have met people at forty who seem entirely complete. Their life has set. Not settled in the pleasant sense of having found peace, but settled as sediment settles at the bottom of a glass. Their preferences, habits, opinions, routines and social world have hardened into something almost architectural.
This is what I do. This is what I do not do. These are my people. These are my opinions. This is how someone of my age behaves, and this is what someone in my position would never consider.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I have a habit of making theories out of small observations. Montaigne would probably forgive me for that, since he did something similar himself, though he was clever enough to remain suspicious of his own conclusions while drawing them.
Nobody decides to fossilize. That is what makes it interesting. It happens through perfectly sensible choices. You acquire a profession, develop routines, learn what works, stop wasting time on what does not, discover your tastes, find people you like, and become more efficient at being yourself.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. The difficulty begins when “this is how I happen to live” quietly becomes “this is how life is lived.”
I sometimes wonder whether Switzerland makes this particularly easy. I do not mean that as an attack on Switzerland. Quite the opposite. Switzerland is exceptionally good at creating structures for life. There are qualifications, professions, insurance systems, schedules, pension plans, clubs, associations, regulations, designated places and designated times. Things work partly because people know where things belong.
There is enormous value in that.
But perhaps a society that organizes the world very successfully also encourages us to organize ourselves with equal efficiency. Swimming belongs in the swimming pool, summer belongs in summer, careers proceed through recognizable stages, and at fifty-five one behaves in a manner appropriate to fifty-five.
Gradually the world can stop appearing as a collection of possibilities and begin to look like a collection of categories.
I noticed something like this recently at Lake Constance. It was the middle of September and I went swimming. The water was around twenty or twenty-one degrees, and to me it felt wonderful.
On the way out I saw a group of women and, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, said something like, “Come on, don't you want to go into the lake?”
One said it was too cold. Another said it was too muddy.
Both were perfectly respectable objections. Nobody is morally required to throw themselves into Lake Constance in September. I told them they only had to go in at the right place and said, “Look at it. It's beautiful.”
One of them looked at the lake and admitted that, yes, actually it was.
Nothing dramatic happened after that. They did not suddenly rush into the water, and there was no cinematic moment of transformation. But I remember the exchange because, for a second, there seemed to be a small movement in perception.
One can look at a lake and immediately think: too cold, too muddy, September, not really swimming weather. Or one can look at exactly the same lake and think: it looks beautiful; I wonder what the water is like.
That second movement is what interests me.
I am tempted to call it lightness, though perhaps that word is too flattering. It certainly is not the same as adventurousness.
That distinction matters because adventurousness can fossilize just as easily as caution. If I began telling myself that I am the kind of man who swims in lakes in September, I could become trapped by that identity too. I can imagine myself at eighty-three, standing beside Lake Constance in a snowstorm, shivering violently and thinking that I have to go in because this is simply who I am.
That would not be freedom. It would merely be a more eccentric prison.
A person who swims exactly forty lengths of an indoor pool every Tuesday may be wonderfully open to life, while someone backpacking through Nepal may be completely imprisoned in the identity of being unconventional. The activity itself tells us less than we think. What matters more is how tightly the self has wrapped itself around the activity.
Perhaps the opposite of fossilization is therefore not youth but revisability.
Or perhaps porosity is a better word.
Some people remain porous to the world. Something can still get in. A book can disturb an opinion, a conversation can alter an afternoon, a lake can suddenly become an invitation, or somebody can suggest something ridiculous and, before immediately explaining why it will not work, you think: well, let's see.
Sometimes you try it and discover that it was indeed ridiculous.
Good.
Now you know.
This is partly why I keep returning to Montaigne. The word essay comes from essayer: to try, to attempt. And that is what he does. He does not merely present conclusions. He tries thoughts, walks around inside them, changes direction, contradicts himself, and suspects himself. He seems less interested in constructing a final system than in watching what his mind does when it encounters the world.
I like that enormously.
And perhaps he treated his life in much the same way. He withdrew to his tower, surrounded himself with books, and imagined a life of contemplation. Then he travelled. Then he became mayor of Bordeaux.
The tower had a door, and Montaigne kept using it.
There is something deeply attractive to me about that.
We create pictures of ourselves because perhaps we need them. I bought a motorcycle because I enjoyed riding motorcycles, but if I am being fair to myself, I also liked the picture of myself on one.
There is vanity in that. Why pretend otherwise?
For a while, that picture was useful because it got me onto the motorcycle. Once I was there, the experience itself began to modify the picture. That is why I no longer think self-images are simply illusions that prevent us from discovering who we really are.
They can be more interesting than that. They can be productive.
You imagine yourself as a writer, so you begin writing. You imagine yourself as brave, and one day you do something slightly frightening. You imagine yourself as independent, and perhaps you make a decision you would otherwise have avoided.
The image produces behaviour, behaviour produces experience, experience modifies the image, and then you begin again.
Perhaps there is no final version. At least I hope not.
Maybe identity works best when treated as a hypothesis. This is who I am, for the moment. This is what I like, for the moment. This is how I live, for the moment.
One of the more dangerous sentences in the language may therefore be: “That's just who I am.”
I have said it myself. Usually it means: please stop asking questions.
A description has become a wall.
The older I become, the less interested I am in producing a definitive account of myself. This is slightly paradoxical because I understand myself much better at fifty-five than I did at twenty. Or at least I think I do. That may itself be another illusion of fifty-five.
What I do know is that there are several versions of me. I can be light, angry, patient, foolish, thoughtful and occasionally almost philosophical. I can also be a tremendous asshole.
Even that admission contains a trap. I can immediately convert it into another flattering self-image: look at me, the wonderfully self-aware man who recognizes all his contradictions.
There is no end to vanity.
Montaigne understood that very well. One escapes through the back door and discovers oneself waiting at the front.
So I am no longer sure that the great task is to discover who I am. Perhaps it is enough to remain editable, to leave the world some say in the matter.
That is what I mean when I say my life is my hobby.
I do not mean that life is entertainment. Much of mine has not been. There were periods when I was carrying too much: studying, working, taking care of a small child, and trying to keep a household and a family functioning when very little seemed to function by itself.
At the time, one simply does what has to be done.
Years later, you see a photograph and think: Jesus. Look at me.
That taught me that time is not the only thing that ages us. Lives age us too. Responsibilities enter the body. Lack of sleep enters it. Jobs enter it. Repetition enters it. The role of being the person who must keep everything running eventually finds somewhere to live in the face and shoulders.
But perhaps the reverse can also happen.
I do not mean becoming chronologically younger. I have little patience with that fantasy. I mean something more modest: becoming lighter again.
Perhaps that means leaving a little distance between yesterday and tomorrow, allowing a lake sometimes to remain a lake before turning it into too cold, too muddy, the wrong season, or not the sort of thing I do.
One kind of old age may begin not when the body becomes less flexible, but when possibility does.
And perhaps staying young, if that phrase is worth keeping at all, has very little to do with behaving young. It may simply mean remaining interruptible enough that the world can still change the afternoon.
You notice something, you become curious, and you try it. It may work, or it may not.
And tomorrow?
I don't know.
That seems to me a perfectly respectable answer.
Let's see what happens.